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Rao awarded Guy Medal in Gold
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“I thank the Society for choosing me for the most coveted award given to a statistician.”
Calyampudi Radhakrishna (C.R.) Rao, research professor in the Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health and Health Professions, has been awarded the prestigious Guy Medal in Gold from the Royal Statistical Society, the United Kingdom’s only professional society for statisticians.
The Guy Medal in Gold is awarded triennially to those “who are judged to have merited a signal mark of distinction by reason of their innovative contributions to the theory or application of statistics.”
Rao was cited “for his fundamental contributions to statistical theory and methodology, including unbiased estimation, variance reduction by sufficiency, efficiency of estimation, information geometry, as well as the application of matrix theory in linear statistical inference.”
Rao received the award June 29 in London. Responding to the honor, he thanked the Royal Statistical Society “for choosing me for the most coveted award given to a statistician.” Recounting his ties with British scholars and academic institutions over the years, Rao said he expects statisticians to be in great demand in the future. He voiced plans “to keep in touch with the Royal Statistical Society in promoting the study and use of statistics in all areas of human endeavor from government and business institutions to individual decision making.”
He is the first non-European and non-American to receive the award since it first was presented in 1892.
Considered by many to be the father of modern statistics, Rao’s theoretical work helped lay the foundation for the field.
His most famous discoveries include the Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao-Blackwell theorem, Rao score test, orthogonal arrays and the analysis of dispersion (MANOVA) in multivariate analysis.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science and the India Science Award—the highest honors given to scientists in the U.S. and India, respectively—as well as the Wilks Medal from the American Statistical Association and the International Mahalanobis Award from the International Statistical Association.
Rao has served as president of all the major statistical societies, including the International Statistical Institute, International Biometric Society and Institute of Mathematical Statistics (U.S.), and is a Fellow of the major scientific academies of the U.S. (National Academy of Sciences), the UK (Royal Statistical Society) and India (Indian National Science), as well as the European Academy of Sciences.
He is author of 300 research papers and 14 books, some of which are translated into European, Japanese and Chinese languages.
Prior to coming to UB, Rao served on the faculties of the Indian Statistical Institute, the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University, where he is a professor emeritus of statistics and former director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis.
He received PhD and ScD degrees from Cambridge University and to date has been awarded 33 honorary doctorates from institutions in 18 countries spanning six continents.
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