Second Indian Nobel Prize

goes to Prof C. R. Rao




Writes Vinod Varshney
New Delhi. Prof. Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was today given the “India Science Award” which is the highest award for Science and Technology in the country, also known as Indian Nobel Prize. He is the second Indian who has been accorded this honour, though at a ripe age of 89.
The award fetches INR 2.5 million and was instituted in 2002. The first award had gone to Prof. C R Rao in 2006. For last two years no Indian scientist could be found worthy of this award. This blog site had first reported yesterday that somebody would be hounoured this year. There was a lot of speculation as to who could be the winning scientist.

Times India Chose Him as One of Top Ten

Prof Rao, an FRS is widely regarded as one of the greatest statisticians of all time along with Deming and Fisher. Times of India dated 31 December 1988 chose C R Rao as one of the 10 top scientists of India considering all disciplines; the list included such outstanding scientists as J.C. Bose, S.N. Bose, S Ramanujan, Harishchandra, G.N.Ramachandran and Nobel Laureates H. Khurana , C.V. Raman and S. Chandrasekhar.
C.R. Rao is purely an Indian product having received all his education in India and making original contributions to statistics while working in India at the Indian Statistical Institute for 40 years before he took mandatory retirement on attaining the age of sixty.
Among his best-known discoveries are the Cramér-Rao bound and the Rao-Blackwell theorem both related to the quality of estimators. He is the author of 14 books and has published over 400 journal publications.

Got Padma Vibhushan

Rao was awarded the United States National Medal of Science, that nation's highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research in June 2002. Government of India awarded him Padma Vibhushan.
Rao received MA degree in mathematics with a first class and first rank from Andhra University (1941) and MA degree in statistics from Calcutta University (1943) with a first class, first rank and a record of marks unbeaten till now, and a gold medal. He started working in the ISI at Calcutta as a research scholar from 1943. Based on the work he did he earned his Ph.D. in 1948 from Cambridge University. A few years later, the university awarded him the prestigious Sc.D. degree based on a peer review of his research contributions to statistics. Up to date he has received 31 Honorary Doctoral Degrees from universities in 18 countries in 6 continents.