Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao (born September 10, 1920) is a world-renowned Indian statistician and currently professor emeritus at Penn State University. He was born in Hadagali, in the state of Karnataka, India.

He received an M.S. in mathematics from Andhra University and an M.S. in Statistics from Calcutta University in 1943.

Rao worked at the Indian Statistical Institute and the Anthropological Museum in Cambridge before acquiring a Ph.D. at King's College in Cambridge University under R.A. Fisher in 1948, to which he added a Sc.D., also from Cambridge, in 1965.

Among his best-known discoveries are the Cramér-Rao bound and the Rao-Blackwell theorem both related to the quality of estimators. Other areas he worked in include multivariate analysis, estimation and differential geometry.

Dr. Rao is a Wilks and Mahalanobis medalist; a member of eight National Academies in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy; he has received dozens of medals, citations, awards, and other honors for his contributions to statistics and science. Dr. Rao was awarded the United States National Medal of Science, that nation's highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research, in June 2002.

Areas of research contributions of Professor Rao include


 * Estimation theory
 * Statistical inference and linear models
 * Multivariate analysis
 * Combinatorial design
 * Biometry
 * Mathematical genetics
 * Generalized matrix inverses
 * Functional equations

Awards & Medals:


 * Government of India awarded him Padma Vibhushan.
 * President Bush, on June 12, 2002, decorated him with the ‘National Medal of Science'
 * Wilks Medal of the American Statistical Association
 * Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society
 * Megnadh Saha Medalof the Indian National Science Academy,
 * S. S. Bhatnagar Award
 * JC Bose Gold Medal of Bose Institute, and
 * Mahalanobis Centenary Gold Medal of the Indian Science Congress.

In his honor:
 * The Pennsylvania State University has established C. R. and Bhargavi Rao Prize in statistics,
 * Osmania University has founded C.R. Rao Advanced Institute for Mathematical and Computer Sciences (AIMCS).