International Prize in Statistics

In News

• The Indian-American statistician Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao has been awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics.

About the Prize

• It was established in 2016 and is awarded once every two years to an individual or team for major achievements using statistics to advance science, technology and human welfare.
• It is considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the field of statistics.
• The ultimate goal of the International Prize in Statistics is to enhance public understanding of the depth and scope of statistics.
• It is managed by the five major statistical organizations: the American Statistical Association; Institute of Mathematical Statistics; International Biometric Society; International Statistical Institute; and Royal Statistical Society.

Work by Radhakrishna Rao

• In his 1945 paper published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, he demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science.
• The Cramér-Rao inequality is the first of the three results of the 1945 paper with applications even in quantum physics, signal processing, spectroscopy, radar systems, multiple-image radiography, risk analysis, and probability theory, among other fields.
• The second outcome was the Rao-Blackwell Theorem, which offers a method to improve an estimate to an optimal estimate.
• A new interdisciplinary area called ‘information geometry’ was born as a result of the paper’s third finding.

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