The International Prize in Statistics is awarded every two years and is considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for this field.
The latest recipient is a 102-year-old Amherst resident.
C.R. Rao will receive the honor, and the $80,000 prize that comes with it, at a conference in July in Ontario.
The award recognizes Rao's pioneering contributions to statistics research and education dating to the 1940s.
The native of India has mentored dozens of graduate students, published foundational textbooks and generated theories that, decades later, remain in use in a range of scientific disciplines.
His family and friends say they are glad Rao is alive to receive this award, the latest in a long line of statistics honors he's earned.
People are also reading…
"This is probably the only award he hasn't received yet," his son, Veera Rao, told The Buffalo News.
Rao moved to this area in 2010 to live with his daughter and was named a research professor at the University at Buffalo – a capstone to his remarkable career.
Recently, age finally has caught up to him. He stopped using a computer and walks less around his daughter's home, where walls are lined with photographs illustrating his long tenure and wide travels as an eminent statistician.
They show Rao with the late Indian Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and then-President George W. Bush, among others.
He has received 40 honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world. The Indian government issues a statistics award named after him. And he earned this country's National Medal of Science.
"He's a legend," said UB President Satish Tripathi, also a native of India who holds two master's degrees in statistics.
Early creative burst
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was born on Sept. 10, 1920, in India's Madras region, now known as Chennai, while it was still under British colonial rule.
He was the eighth of 10 children born to parents who encouraged his interest in mathematics.
His mother would wake him at 5 a.m. so that he could begin his schoolwork while his mind was at its freshest, said his daughter, Teja Rao, who danced professionally and taught nutrition at SUNY Buffalo State University.
"She would light the lamp for him to study," she said.
After earning a master's degree in mathematics at 19, he left for Calcutta, where he joined the Indian Statistical Institute. He remained there for the next 40 years.
Rao published his first research paper in 1941, within three months of joining the institute, and more than 30 other papers followed over five years, according to a documentary produced in 2020 and narrated by his daughter's partner, Vincent O'Neill, the local theater impresario.
"Dad was always an out-of-the-box thinker. That, I believe, led to his creativity and original thinking style," Veera Rao, an engineer and computer scientist, said in the documentary.
One day in 1943, a student at the institute asked Rao a question he wasn't able to answer in class.
"Rao said he would try to find out that night. He worked out the result and answered the student the next morning," O'Neill narrated. "The work he did that night became three of his most recognized theorems."
The research was published in 1945 in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society. That paper, according to the international prize organization, "paved the way for the modern field of statistics."
The organization identified the theorems as:
- The Cramér-Rao lower bound, which "provides a means for knowing when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be."
- The Rao-Blackwell theorem, which "provides a means for transforming an estimate into a better – in fact, an optimal – estimate."
- And a third result known as Rao distance, later as the Fisher-Rao metric, that offered insights leading to the new interdisciplinary field of "information geometry."
"Combined, these results help scientists more efficiently extract information from data," the organization said.
Rao was just 25 when the paper was published.
A father of Indian statistics
In 1946, he went to Cambridge University, in England, to help identify the origins of the people of Jebel Moya, in Africa, based on skeletal remains excavated from ancient gravesites. He was awarded a Ph.D. based on this work from King's College, Cambridge, which later named him a life fellow.
A photo at Teja Rao's home shows an impish Rao climbing through the window of an academic building there because he had locked himself out and needed to get to his lab to feed his research mice.
After Cambridge, Rao returned to take a leadership position at the institute at Calcutta. He mentored the first of what became more than 50 doctoral students, many of whom went on to distinguished careers of their own.
In 1948, Rao wed his wife, Bhargavi, in an arranged marriage. They were distant relatives who met as children but didn't see each other again until the morning of their wedding, Teja Rao said.
Bhargavi Rao died in 2017.
"She was his friend, confidant and constant companion for 69 years," O'Neill said in the documentary.
Teja Rao said her father stuck to a strict schedule of work, reading, meals and walking for exercise.
"I think his discipline is the secret to his life," Teja Rao said.
His statistical research helped guide Indian government policy during this period, including a five-year economic plan developed after the nation won its independence, his son said.
In 1963, he received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Memorial Award, but he donated the 10,000-rupee cash prize – $9,739 in today's dollars – to India's National Defense Fund.
"The country's need at present is greater than mine," Rao said then, according to a brief article preserved at Teja Rao's home.
Rao continued his work at the institute through the 1970s, until he approached the mandatory retirement age of 60.
He was recruited in 1979 to come to the University of Pittsburgh, where he stayed until moving in 1988 to Pennsylvania State University, which produced the 2020 documentary and gives out the C.R. and Bhargavi Rao Prize in the couple's honor.
In 2007, the University of Hyderabad, in India, opened the C.R. Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, located on Professor C.R. Rao Road.
Long career honored
By 2010, at the age of 90, Rao moved with his wife to Amherst.
Tripathi, UB's president, said he knew Teja Rao and learned C.R. Rao would be moving here. He was sure Rao, even at his age, could contribute to the university.
UB named Rao a research professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health and Health Professions.
"We feel really proud that we have some association with him," said Tripathi.
Venu Govindaraju, UB's vice president for research and economic development, collaborated with Rao on a book on machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence and computer science, published in 2013 as part of a series of academic works under Rao's name.
"He was the one who said, 'Venu, we should do machine learning,' " Govindaraju said. "He knew exactly where the field was going."
He said he enjoyed meeting with Rao to discuss this and a second book of theirs, often while a tennis match played on TV in the background.
"I think it's very, very rare to have such a genius and also be so humble and down to earth," Govindaraju said.
UB took part in the international celebration of Rao's 100th birthday that began in 2019 and continued into 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic. His last paper was published that year, Teja Rao said.
Until several months ago, Rao could send and answer emails on his computer, use a walker to make his way around his daughter's home and savor a glass of red wine.
He still enjoys teasing his loved ones, such as describing O'Neill, who is 73, as "too old," or Veera Rao, nine years younger than his sister, as "an afterthought" child.
When Veera Rao visited for the first time with a new goatee, the elder Rao looked up from his beloved Buffalo News, rubbed his own chin, and looked back down.
His children said Rao was pleased to learn of his latest award one month ago, though it's unlikely he will travel to Ottawa in July to personally receive the honor. The International Prize in Statistics was first issued in 2017 and Rao is the fourth recipient.
During a recent visit, Teja Rao showed a News reporter and photographer a display of medallions and other awards on the mantle in her father's room.
"They are all your medals, Nana," she said, using a term for "Daddy." "And now you are getting another one."