C.RADHAKRISHNA RAO

CONTRIBUTIONS TO STATISTICAL THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

                                       C. Radhakrishna Rao is among the world leaders in statistical science over the last six decades. His research, scholarship, and professional services have had a profound influence on theory and applications of statistics.

Technical terms such as, Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao-Blackwellization, Rao’s Score Test, Fisher-Rao and Rao Theorems on second order efficiency of an estimator, Rao
metric and distance, Analysis of Dispersion (MANOVA) and Canonical Variate analysis and G-inverse of matrices appear in all standard books on statistics. Cramer-Rao Bound and Rao-Blackwellization are the most frequently quoted key words in statistical and engineering literature. Special uses of Cramer-Rao Bound under the technical term, Quantum Cramer- Rao Bound have appeared in Quantum Physics. Rao-Blackwellization has found applications in adaptive sampling, particle filtering in high-dimensional state spaces, dynamic Bayesian networks etc. These results have led to contributions of strategic significance to signal detection, tracking of non-friendly planes and recognition of objects by shape.

Rao has made some significant contributions to combinatorial mathematics for use in design of experiments, the most important of which is Orthogonal arrays (OA).The basic paper on the subject appeared in Proc. Edinburgh Math. Soc. (the referee of the paper reported that it is a fresh and original piece of work). The Japanese Quality Control Expert, G.Taguchi made extensive use of OA’s (described by Forbes Magazine as “new mantra” for industries), in industrial experimentation.
Rao defined a generalized inverse (g-inverse) of a matrix (singular or rectangular) and demonstrated its usefulness in the study of linear models and singular multivariate normal distributions.

He is the author of 14 books and about 350 research papers. Three of his books have been translated into several European and Chinese and Japanese languages