Context:
Calayampudi Radhakrishna Rao, a prominent Indian-American mathematician and statistician, will be awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in the field.
Relevance:
Facts for prelims
Dimensions of the Article:
- About International Prize in Statistics:
- Works and Awards of C R Rao:
About International Prize in Statistics:
- Awarded every two years.
- Collaboration among five leading international statistics organizations
- Recognizes major achievements in the statistics field
- Particularly focuses on achievements that led to practical applications and breakthroughs in other disciplines
- Modeled after the Nobel prizes, Abel Prize, Fields Medal, and Turing Award
Works and Awards of C R Rao:
Works:
- C R Rao’s 1945 paper in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society demonstrated three fundamental results that laid the foundation for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools that are widely used in science today.
- His work introduced the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound, which provides a way to determine when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be, and the Rao-Blackwell Theorem, which provides a way to transform an estimate into an optimal estimate. These results are essential to many statistical analyses.
- C R Rao’s work on information geometry provided insights that established a new interdisciplinary field known as “information geometry.” Information geometry is the study of the geometrical structure of families of probability distributions.
Significance of Rao’s Contribution:
- Rao’s work has contributed significantly to the optimization of Higgs boson measurements at the Large Hadron Collider, as well as advancements in artificial intelligence, data science, signal processing, shape classification, and image segregation.
- The Rao-Blackwell process has been applied to stereology, particle filtering, and computational econometrics, among others.
- The Cramer-Rao lower bound is of great importance in diverse fields such as signal processing, spectroscopy, radar systems, multiple image radiography, risk analysis, and quantum physics.
Awards:
- C R Rao was conferred with the Padma Bhushan award in 1968 and the Padma Vibhushan award in 2001 for his contributions to the field of statistics.
Source: Indian Express
