Indian-American C.R. Rao wins Nobel Prize equivalent in statistics

Source: The post is based on the article “Indian-American C.R. Rao wins Nobel Prize equivalent in statistics” published in The Hindu on 10th April 2023

What is the News?

Indian-American statistician Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao has been awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Statistics.

What is the International Prize in Statistics?

The International Prize in Statistics is awarded every two years by a collaboration among five leading international statistics organizations. 

The prize recognizes a major achievement by an individual or team in the statistics field, particularly the achievement of powerful and original ideas that have led to practical applications and breakthroughs in other disciplines.

Why was C R Rao awarded the International Prize in Statistics?

He was awarded for his groundbreaking paper, ‘Information and accuracy attainable in the estimation of statistical parameters’ published in 1945. It demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics:

Cramér-Rao lower bound: It provides a means for knowing when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be.

Rao-Blackwell Theorem: It provides a means for transforming an estimate into a better—in fact, an optimal—estimate.

Information geometry: It integrated principles from differential geometry into statistics, including the concepts of metric, distance, and measure.

– Note: Information geometry has recently been used to aid the understanding and optimization of Higgs boson measurements at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.