C. R. Rao
C. R. Rao (1920 - )
Calyampudi
Radhakrishna Rao was born to C.D. Naidu and A. Laxmikantamma on 10
September
1920 in Huvvina Hadagalli in present day Karnataka. He was the eighth
in a
family of 10 children. After his father’s retirement,
the family settled down in Vishakapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. From his
earliest years, Rao had an interest in mathematics. After completing
high school he joined the Mrs.
A.V.N. College at
Vishakapatnam for the Intermediate course. He received his M.A.
in
Mathematics with first rank in 1940. Rao decided to pursue a research
career in
mathematics, but was denied a scholarship on the grounds of late
submission of
the application.
He then went to
Kolkata for an interview for a job. He did not get the job, but by
chance he
visited the Indian Statistical Institute, then located in a couple of rooms in the Physics
Department of the
Presidency College, Kolkata. He applied for a one-year training
course
at the Institute and was admitted to the Training Section of the
Institute from
1 January 1941. In July 1941 he joined the M.A Statistics program of
the
Calcutta University. By the time he passed the M.A. exam in 1943,
winning the
gold medal of the University, he had already published some research
papers! In
1943 he joined ISI as a technical apprentice, doing research, teaching
in the
Training Section of the Institute and at Calcutta University and
assisting
Professor Mahalanobis in editing Sankhya the
Indian Journal of Statistics.
In 1946 he was deputed to the Cambridge
University on a project. While working full time on this, he also
worked in the
genetic laboratory of R.A. Fisher, the father of modern statistics and
completed his Ph.D. under Fisher.
By this
time Rao had already completed some of the work which carries his
name:
Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao-Blackwell theorem, Rao’s score test and
Rao’s
orthogonal arrays. He returned to ISI in 1948 and in 1949 was made a
Professor
at the very young age of 29. He headed and developed the Research and
Training
Section of the ISI, and went on to become Director of the ISI. He
became the
associate editor of the Sankhya in 1964 and became the editor in 1972. He left ISI in
1978 and
joined the University of Pittsburgh. In 1988 he moved to the
Pennsylvannia State University holding the Eberly Family Chair in
Statistics
and the Directorship of the Centre for Multivariate Analysis till 2001.