C.R. Rao has been awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics for his work that has had a profound impact on the field of modern statistics, in a career spanning over 75 years.
In his 1945 paper published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Rao demonstrated three groundbreaking results. The first, now known as the Cramér-Rao lower bound, provides a means for knowing when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be. The second result, named the Rao-Blackwell Theorem, provides a means for transforming an estimate into a better – in fact, an optimal – estimate. The third result provided insights that pioneered a whole new interdisciplinary field that has now flourished as ‘information geometry’. Combined, these results help scientists more efficiently extract information from data.
The Rao-Blackwell process has been applied to stereology, particle filtering, and computational econometrics among others, while the Cramér-Rao lower bound is of great importance in such diverse fields as signal processing, spectroscopy, radar systems, multiple image radiography, risk analysis and quantum physics.
‘In awarding this prize, we celebrate the monumental work by C.R. Rao that not only revolutionized statistical thinking in its time but also continues to exert enormous influence on human understanding of science across a wide spectrum of disciplines,’ said Guy Nason, chair of the International Prize in Statistics Foundation.
The International Prize in Statistics is awarded every two years by a collaboration between the RSS and four other leading international statistical organisations (the American Statistical Association, International Biometric Society, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, International Statistical Institute). It recognises a major achievement by an individual or team in the statistics field, particularly an achievement of powerful and original ideas that has led to practical applications and breakthroughs in other disciplines.
Rao will receive the prize, which comes with an $80,000 award, this July at the biennial International Statistical Institute World Statistics Congress, which will be held in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.