Indian-American mathematician and statistician Calyampudi Radhakrishnan Rao has been selected to receive the 2023 International Prize in Statistics for his pioneering contributions to statistical theory. Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Statistics,” the award comes with a cash prize of $80,000 and will be presented to Rao during the International Statistical Institute’s biennial World Statistics Congress in July 2023, in Ottawa, Canada.
Born in Hadagali, Karnataka, India, Rao had his schooling in Andhra Pradesh and completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in mathematics at Andhra University, before earning his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Cambridge in 1943. Throughout his distinguished career, he has held visiting positions at several universities worldwide, including the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata; the Central Statistical Institute, Delhi; Stanford University; and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also authored more than 400 research papers and a number of books on statistics and mathematics.
Rao is known for his seminal 1945 paper, published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, which introduced three fundamental results that revolutionized statistical theory and laid the foundation for many of the statistical tools used in modern science today. His contributions include the Cramer-Rao lower bound and the Rao-Blackwell theorem, which have been widely applied in various fields, such as the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, and radar and antenna research, image segregation, and AI.
