Page 618 - Probability and Statistical Inference

14. Appendix 595

30, 1924. He completed his school and college education in Delhi. He received
Ph.D. in statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He
was in the first batch of Ph.D. advisees of Herbert Robbins.
During 1956-1961, Bahadur was a professor in the Research and Training
School of the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. In 1961, he left the Insti-
tute to join University of Chicago, a position he held ever since.
Bahadur’s contributions on large deviation theory, sufficiency, MLE, com-
parisons of tests, sample quantiles, sequential decisions, transitive sufficiency,
are truly noteworthy. He was a master in his unique approach to unveil the
inner beauty in some of the hardest problems. Anything he published is con-
sidered a jewel by many statisticians. The phrases Bahadur Efficiency, Bahadur
Slope and Bahadur Representation of Quantiles have become household words
in statistics. At the 1974 inauguration ceremony of the Delhi campus of the
Indian Statistical Institute, Jerzy Neyman referred to Bahadur as the brightest
of the two hundred and fifty stars of Indian origin shining in U.S.A. in the
field of statistics.
In September, 1969, Bahadur gave the NSF-CBMS lectures in the Depart-
ment of Statistics of Florida State University, which led to his monograph,
Some Limit Theorems in Statistics (1971, SIAM). This monograph is a classic
in large sample theory. An international symposium was arranged in Delhi in
December 1988 to honor the memory of R. C. Bose. Bahadur edited the
symposium volume, Probability, Statistics and Design of Experiments (1990,
Wiley Eastern).
Bahadur received many honors in U.S.A. and India. He received
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. He was an elected Fellow of the Indian
National Science Academy and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Bahadur
became President (1974) of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and gave
the Wald Lecture. Bahadur was very friendly, unassuming and always ap-
proachable. He cared about the people around him, students and colleagues
alike.
Bahadur died on June 7, 1997 after long illness. In the obituary of Bahadur,
Stigler (1997) wrote: “He was extremely modest in demeanor and uncomfort-
able when being honored, ... .” Stigler’s article and Bahadur’s own little write-
up, Remarks on Transitive Sufficiency, which was included in Ghosh et al.
(1992) provide more details on this one of a kind statistician’s life and work.
D. Basu: Debabrata Basu was born on July 5, 1924 in Dhaka, India
(now Bangladesh). His father was the Head of the Department of Math-
ematics at Dhaka University. He went through the undergraduate and Mas-
ters’ degree programs at this university. During this period, he was charmed
by the lectures of the famous number theorist, T. Vijayraghavan. Basu