Events to Celebrate Statistician C.R. Rao's 90th Birthday

Four major international events are among the celebrations in honor of Penn State's C.R. Rao, Eberly Professor Emeritus of Statistics and one of the world's top statisticians, who is turning 90 years old. Formal celebrations include the International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics to be held from 5 to 8 June 2010 in Shanghai, China; the Frontiers of Interface Between Statistics and Sciences Conference held from 30 December 2009 through 2 January 2010 in Hyderabad, India; the International Conference on Statistics, Probability, Operations Research, Computer Science, and Allied Areas held from 4 to 8 January 2010 in Vizag, India; and the Statistical Science Reflections and Visions Conference held from 10 to 11 January 2010 in Kolkata, India.

Also to commemorate Rao's 90th birthday, the Indian Department of Science and Technology honored him with the "India Science Award," the highest honor given to a scientist. Also during 2010, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation -- the urban planning agency that oversees Hyderabad -- is renaming one of the city's roadways "Prof. C.R. Rao Road," and the government of India's postal department released a special envelope featuring Rao's photograph.

Rao is recognized internationally as a pioneer who laid the foundation of modern statistics, with multifaceted distinctions as a mathematician, researcher, scientist, and teacher. His contributions to mathematics and to the theory and application of statistics during the last six decades have become part of graduate and postgraduate courses in statistics, econometrics, electrical engineering, and many other disciplines at most universities throughout the world. Rao's research in multivariate analysis, for example, is useful in economic planning, weather prediction, medical diagnosis, tracking the movements of spy planes, and monitoring the movements of spacecraft. Technical terms bearing his name appear in all standard textbooks on statistics, econometrics, and engineering, including such terms as the Cramer-Rao Inequality, Rao-Blackwellization, Fisher-Rao Theorem, Rao Distance, Rao's Orthoganal Arrays, and Rao's Score test. A book he wrote in 1965, Linear Statistical Inference and Its Applications, is one of the most-often-cited books in science.

Among his numerous awards, Rao has received 32 honorary doctoral degrees from universities in 18 countries on six continents, and was honored in 2003 with the first Mahalanobis International Award in Statistics from the International Statistical Institute and the Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal by the Indian National Science Academy. In 2002 Rao was honored by President George W. Bush with the National Medal of Science, the highest award given to an American scientist for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research.

He has been honored by the government of India with the Padma Vibhushan award in 2001 -- the country's second-highest civilian honor -- for outstanding contributions to science, engineering, and statistics; with being selected in 2000 as the namesake for a National Award to be presented to India's outstanding young statisticians; and with the highest honor bestowed by the University of Visva-Bharati, the 2002 Desikottama award, in recognition of his "enormous contributions in the field of statistics and its applications."

Rao is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science in the United States, a Fellow of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, and a member of the Indian National Science Academy, the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, and the Developing World Academy of Sciences.

He has authored or co-authored 14 books -- some of which have been translated into several languages -- and more than 300 research papers published in scientific journals. He has supervised the doctoral research of 50 students who have, in turn, trained another 390 doctoral students themselves. Most of his former students now are employed in universities and other research organizations worldwide, many becoming research leaders in their areas of specialization.

Rao earned his Ph.D. and Sc.D. degrees in 1948 at Cambridge University in England. He came to the United States in 1978 after serving as the director of the Indian Statistical Institute, where he had held various research and administrative positions since 1943. In 1982 he established the Center for Multivariate Analysis at the University of Pittsburgh, where he continues as an adjunct professor. Rao joined the Penn State faculty in 1988 as a professor and holder of the Eberly Chair in Statistics. He was named the Eberly Professor of Statistics in 1989 and he became the Eberly Professor Emeritus of Statistics in 2009. Among his many achievements at Penn State, he was the founding director of the Center for Multivariate Statistics.