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Rao
a highly decorated faculty member
June
12, 2002
Calyampudi
R. Rao, emeritus holder of the Eberly Family chair in statistics
and director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis, has received
numerous honors during the course of his career.
Rao is internationally
acknowledged as one of the pioneers who laid the foundation
of modern statistics, as well as one of the world’s top
five statisticians with multifaceted distinctions as a mathematician,
researcher, scientist and teacher. His pioneering contributions
to mathematics and statistical theory and applications have
become part of graduate and postgraduate courses in statistics,
econometrics, electrical engineering and many other disciplines
at most universities throughout the world.
His research, scholarship
and professional services have had a profound influence on the
theory and application of statistics in such diverse fields
as anthropology, geology, biology, psychology, social sciences
and national planning. Rao’s research in multivariate analysis,
for example, has been used to improve economic planning, weather
prediction, medical diagnosis, tracking the movements of spy
planes and monitoring the course of spacecrafts. Technical terms
bearing his name appear in all standard textbooks on statistics,
including such terms as the Cramer-Rao Inequality, Rao-Blackwellization,
Rao’s Score Test, Fisher-Rao Theorem and Rao Distance.
A book he wrote in 1965, Linear Statistical Inference and Its
Applications, is one of the most-often-cited books in science.
Rao is a member
of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy
of Arts and Science in the United States, a Fellow of the Royal
Society in the United Kingdom and a member of the Indian National
Science Academy, the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences and the
Third World Academy of Sciences.
The recipient of
numerous awards throughout his career, including the 2000 Emanuel
and Carol Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation, Rao also
has received a number of medals, including the Wilks Medal from
the American Statistical Association, the Guy Medal in Silver
of the Royal Statistical Society of England, the Megnadh Saha
Medal of the Indian National Science Academy, the J.C. Bose
Gold Medal of the Bose Institute and the Mahalanobis Centenary
Gold Medal of the Indian Science Congress. He has been awarded
27 honorary doctoral degrees from universities in 16 countries.
He has been honored
by the Government of India with the Padma Vibhushan award —
the country’s second-highest civilian honor for outstanding
contributions to science, engineering and statistics. He also
was selected as the namesake for a National Award to be presented
to India’s outstanding young statisticians; and with receiving
from the prime minister of India the highest honor bestowed
by the University of Visva-Bharati, the Desikottama award, whose
translation in English is “Ideal Person of the Country,”
in recognition of his “enormous contributions in the field
of statistics and its applications.”
Rao was born in
1920 and earned his Ph.D. and Sc.D. degrees in 1948 at Cambridge
University in England. He held many important positions during
the course of his career, including the directorship of the
Indian Statistical Institute, the Jawaharlal Nehru Professorship
and the National Professorship in India, and the University
Professorship at the University of Pittsburgh. Rao came to the
United States 1978 after serving as director of the Indian Statistical
Institute, where he had held various research and administrative
positions since 1944. In 1982 he established the Center for
Multivariate Analysis at the University of Pittsburgh, where
he continues as adjunct professor. He joined the Penn State
faculty in 1988.
He has authored
or co-authored 14 books and more than 300 research papers published
in scientific journals. He has supervised the doctoral research
of approximately 50 students, most of whom now are employed
in universities and other research organizations worldwide and
many of whom have become research leaders in their areas of
their specialization.
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