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simply that “The problem was worth investigating.” Rao’s life, career, and
accomplishments have been documented in an interview article [DeGroot
(1987)]. Rao’s (1992b) article, Statistics as a Last Resort, has many interest-
ing stories and important historical details.
After securing M.A. degree in mathematics, Rao started looking for a job
without much success. The war broke out. Eventually he came to Calcutta to
be interviewed for a position of “a mathematician for the army service unit”
and there he met an individual who was sent to Calcutta to receive “training in
statistics” from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), founded earlier by P. C.
Mahalanobis. He was told that statistics was a subject for the future. Rao
went to visit ISI and he immediately decided to join to get “training in statis-
tics.” Mahalanobis admitted him to the Training Section of ISI starting Janu-
ary 1, 1941. The rest has been history.
After Rao returned to Calcutta in August, 1948 from Cambridge with a
Ph.D. degree, he became a full professor in ISI. For the next thirty years, Rao
was a key figure for nurturing the Institute’s programs, goals, and aspira-
tions. He has advised Ph.D. dissertations of many distinguished statisticians
and probabilists, including D. Basu, V. S. Varadarajan, S. R. S. Varadhan, K.
R. Parthasarathy, and DesRaj.
During 1949-1963, Rao was Head of the Division of Theoretical Statistics
in ISI. He became Director of the Research and Training School in ISI in
1963. In 1976, he gave up his administrative position in ISI, but continued as
the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor, a special chair created for Rao by the Prime
Minister of India, Indira Gandhi. After the death of Mahalanobis, the Chief of
ISI, Rao held the position of the Director and Secretary of ISI.
In the summer of 1978, Rao came for a casual visit to the University of
Pittsburgh and he was invited to give a university-wide popular lecture. The
day after his lecture, he was offered a position which was totally “unex-
pected” as Rao (1992b) recalled. He started a new career at the University of
Pittsburgh in 1979. In 1988, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania as
Professor and holder of the Eberly Chair in Statistics. He is also Director of
the Center for Multivariate Analysis. He has been the Editor or Co-Editor of
Sankhy&abar;, The Indian Journal of Statistics for many years since 1964.
Rao has made legendary contributions practically in all areas of statis-
tics. Many contributions, for example, on sufficiency, information, maxi-
mum likelihood, estimation, tests, multivariate analysis, discriminant analy-
sis, linear models, linear algebra, generalized inverses of matrices, MINQE
theory, design of experiments and combinatorics are path-breaking. Through
the last five decades, many of his discoveries have been incorporated as
standard material in courses and curriculum in mathematics, statistics, proba-