Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis

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Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
PCMahalanobis.png
Prasanta Chandra
Born Bengali:
29 June 1893
Calcutta, Bengal, British India
Died 28 June 1972 (aged 78)
Calcutta, West Bengal, India (now Kolkata)
Residence

India, United Kingdom, United States

Nationality

Indian

Fields Mathematics, Statistics

Institutions University of Cambridge
Indian Statistical Institute
Alma mater Presidency College, Calcutta
King's College, Cambridge[1]
Doctoral advisor

W. H. Macaulay[2]

Doctoral students Samarendra Roy[2]

Other notable students

Raj Chandra Bose

C.R. Rao
Known for

Mahalanobis distance

Notable awards

Padma Vibhushan (1968)

Fellow of the Royal Society[1]

Weldon Memorial Prize

Signature

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis FRS[1] (29 June 1893 28 June 1972) was an Indian
scientist and applied statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis
distance, a statistical measure and for being one of the members of the first
Planning commission of free india. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in
India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to the design of
large-scale sample surveys.[1][3][4][5]

Contents [hide]
1

Early life

Indian Statistical Institute

Contributions to statistics

3.1

Mahalanobis distance

3.2

Sample surveys

Later life

Honours

See also

References

Bibliography

External links

Early life[edit]
Mahalanobis belonged to a family of Bengali landed gentry who lived in Bikrampur
(now in Bangladesh). His grandfather Gurucharan (18331916) moved to Calcutta in
1854 and built up a business, starting a chemist shop in 1860. Gurucharan was
influenced by Debendranath Tagore (18171905), father of the Nobel Prizewinning
poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Gurucharan was actively involved in social movements
such as the Brahmo Samaj, acting as its Treasurer and President. His house on 210
Cornwallis Street was the center of the Brahmo Samaj. Gurucharan married a
widow, an action against social traditions.

His elder son Subodhchandra (18671953) became a distinguished educator after

studying physiology at Edinburgh University. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh.[1] He was the Head of the Dept. of Physiology, University of
Cardiff (the first Indian to occupy this post in a British university). In 1900,
Subodhchandra returned to India, founding the Dept. of Physiology in the Presidency
College, Calcutta. Subodhchandra also became a member of the Senate of the
Calcutta University.

Gurucharan's younger son, Prabodh Chandra (1869-1942) was the father of P. C.

Mahalanobis. Born in the house at 210 Cornwallis Street, P. C. Mahalanobis, grew up
in a socially active family surrounded by intellectuals and reformers.[1]

Mahalanobis received his early schooling at the Brahmo Boys School in Calcutta,
graduating in 1908. He joined the Presidency College, Calcutta where he was taught
by teachers who included Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Prafulla Chandra Ray. Others
attending were Meghnad Saha, a year junior, and Subhas Chandra Bose, two years
his junior at college.[6] Mahalanobis received a Bachelor of Science degree with
honours in physics in 1912. He left for England in 1913 to join the University of
London.

After missing a train, he stayed with a friend at King's College, Cambridge. He was
impressed by King's College Chapel and his host's friend M. A. Candeth suggested
that he could try joining there, which he did. He did well in his studies at King's, but
also took an interest in cross-country walking and punting on the river. He
interacted with the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan during the latter's
time at Cambridge.[7] After his Tripos in physics, Mahalanobis worked with C. T. R.
Wilson at the Cavendish Laboratory. He took a short break and went to India, where
he was introduced to the Principal of Presidency College and was invited to take
classes in physics.[1]

After returning to England, Mahalanobis was introduced to the journal Biometrika.

This interested him so much that he bought a complete set and took them to India.
He discovered the utility of statistics to problems in meteorology and anthropology,
beginning to work on problems on his journey back to India.[1]

In Calcutta, Mahalanobis met Nirmalkumari, daughter of Herambhachandra Maitra,

a leading educationist and member of the Brahmo Samaj. They married on 27

February 1923, although her father did not completely approve of the union. He was
concerned about Mahalanobis's opposition to various clauses in the membership of
the student wing of the Brahmo Samaj, including prohibitions against members'
drinking alcohol and smoking. Sir Nilratan Sircar, P. C. Mahalanobis' maternal uncle,
took part in the wedding ceremony in place of the father of the bride.[1]

Indian Statistical Institute[edit]

Main article: Indian Statistical Institute

Mahalanobis memorial at ISI Delhi.

Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics. An informal group
developed in the Statistical Laboratory, which was located in his room at the
Presidency College, Calcutta. On 17 December 1931 Mahalanobis called a meeting
with Pramatha Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen
(Khaira Professor of Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. Together they
established the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), and formally registered on 28 April
1932 as a non-profit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act
XXI of 1860.[1]

The Institute was initially in the Physics Department of the Presidency College; its
expenditure in the first year was Rs. 238. It gradually grew with the pioneering work
of a group of his colleagues, including S. S. Bose, J. M. Sengupta, R. C. Bose, S. N.
Roy, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, Gopinath Kallianpur, D. B. Lahiri and C. R. Rao. The
institute also gained major assistance through Pitamber Pant, who was a secretary
to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Pant was trained in statistics at the Institute and
took a keen interest in its affairs.[1]

In 1933, the Institute founded the journal Sankhya, along the lines of Karl Pearson's
Biometrika.[1]

The institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the early workers left the ISI
for careers in the United States and with the government of India. Mahalanobis
invited J. B. S. Haldane to join him at the ISI; Haldane joined as a Research Professor
from August 1957, staying until February 1961. He resigned from the ISI due to
frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis' policies.
He was concerned with the frequent travels and absence of the director and

complained that the "... journeyings of our Director define a novel random vector."
Haldane helped the ISI develop in biometrics.[8]

In 1959, the institute was declared as an institute of national importance and a

deemed university.[1]

Contributions to statistics[edit]
Mahalanobis distance[edit]
Main article: Mahalanobis distance
A chance meeting with Nelson Annandale, then the director of the Zoological Survey
of India, at the 1920 Nagpur session of the Indian Science Congress led to
Annandale asking him to analyse anthropometric measurements of Anglo-Indians in
Calcutta. Mahalanobis had been influenced by the anthropometric studies published
in the journal Biometrika and he chose to ask the questions on what factors
influence the formation of European and Indian marriages. He wanted to examine if
the Indian side came from any specific castes. He used the data collected by
Annandale and the caste specific measurements made by Herbert Risley to come
up with the conclusion that the sample represented a mix of Europeans mainly with
people from Bengal and Punjab but not with those from the Northwest Frontier
Provinces or from Chhota Nagpur. He also concluded that the intermixture more
frequently involved the higher castes than the lower ones.[9][10] This analysis was
described by his first scientific paper in 1922.[11] During the course of these studies
he found a way of comparing and grouping populations using a multivariate
distance measure. This measure, denoted "D2" and now eponymously named
Mahalanobis distance, is independent of measurement scale.[1] Mahalanobis also
took an interest in physical anthropology and in the accurate measurement of skull
measurements for which he developed an instrument that he called the
"profiloscope".[12]

Sample surveys[edit]
His most important contributions are related to large-scale sample surveys. He
introduced the concept of pilot surveys and advocated the usefulness of sampling
methods. Early surveys began between 1937 and 1944 and included topics such as
consumer expenditure, tea-drinking habits, public opinion, crop acreage and plant
disease. Harold Hotelling wrote: "No technique of random sample has, so far as I
can find, been developed in the United States or elsewhere, which can compare in
accuracy with that described by Professor Mahalanobis" and Sir R. A. Fisher

commented that "The ISI has taken the lead in the original development of the
technique of sample surveys, the most potent fact finding process available to the
administration".[1]

He introduced a method for estimating crop yields which involved statisticians

sampling in the fields by cutting crops in a circle of diameter 4 feet. Others such as
P. V. Sukhatme and V. G. Panse who began to work on crop surveys with the Indian
Council of Agricultural Research and the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research
Institute suggested that a survey system should make use of the existing
administrative framework. The differences in opinion led to acrimony and there was
little interaction between Mahalanobis and agricultural research in later years.[13]
[14][15]

Later life[edit]
In later life, Mahalanobis was a member of the planning commission[16] contributed
prominently to newly independent India's five-year plans starting from the second.
In the second five-year plan he emphasised industrialisation on the basis of a twosector model.[1] His variant of Wassily Leontief's Input-output model, the
Mahalanobis model, was employed in the Second Five Year Plan, which worked
towards the rapid industrialisation of India and with other colleagues at his institute,
he played a key role in the development of a statistical infrastructure. He
encouraged a project to assess deindustrialisation in India and correct some
previous census methodology errors and entrusted this project to Daniel Thorner.
[17]

Mahalanobis also had an abiding interest in cultural pursuits and served as

secretary to Rabindranath Tagore, particularly during the latter's foreign travels, and
also worked at his Visva-Bharati University, for some time. He received one of the
highest civilian awards, the Padma Vibhushan from the Government of India for his
contribution to science and services to the country.

Mahalanobis died on 28 June 1972, a day before his seventy-ninth birthday. Even at
this age, he was still active doing research work and discharging his duties as the
Secretary and Director of the Indian Statistical Institute and as the Honorary
Statistical Advisor to the Cabinet of the Government of India.

Honours[edit]
Weldon Memorial Prize from the University of Oxford (1944)
Fellow of the Royal Society, London (1945)[1][18]
President of Indian Science Congress (1950)
Fellow of the Econometric Society, USA (1951)
Fellow of the Pakistan Statistical Association (1952)
Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, UK (1954)
Sir Deviprasad Sarvadhikari Gold Medal (1957)
Foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958)
Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge (1959)
Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1961)
Durgaprasad Khaitan Gold Medal (1961)
Padma Vibhushan (1968)
Srinivasa Ramanujam Gold Medal (1968)
The government of India decided in 2006 to celebrate his birthday, 29 June, as
National Statistical Day.[19][20]

See also[edit]
List of Indian mathematicians
References[edit]
^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Rao, C. R. (1973). "Prasantha Chandra
Mahalanobis 1893-1972". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 19:
454. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1973.0017.
^ Jump up to: a b Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis at the Mathematics Genealogy
Project
Jump up ^ Hagger-Johnson, G. (2005). "Mahalanobis, Prasanta Chandra".
Encyclopedia of Statistics in Behavioral Science. doi:10.1002/0470013192.bsa360.
ISBN 0470860804.

Jump up ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Prasanta Chandra

Mahalanobis", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
Jump up ^ Ghosh, J. K.; Majumder, P. P. (2005). "Mahalanobis, Prasanta Chandra".
Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. doi:10.1002/0470011815.b2a17090. ISBN
047084907X.
Jump up ^ Venkataraman, G. (1995). Saha and his formula. Hyderabad: Universities
Press. p. 3.
Jump up ^ Krishnamurthy, Prof. V. "Srinivasa Ramanujan - His life and his genius".
www.krishnamurthys.com. (Expository address delivered on Sep.16, 1987 at
Visvesvarayya Auditorium as part of the celebrations of Ramanujan Centenary by
the IISC, Bangalore). Retrieved 7 September 2016.
Jump up ^ Dronamraju, K. R. (1987). "On Some Aspects of the Life and Work of John
Burdon Sanderson Haldane, F.R.S., in India". Notes and Records of the Royal Society.
41 (2): 211237. doi:10.1098/rsnr.1987.0006. PMID 11622022.
Jump up ^ Dasgupta, Somesh (1993). "The evolution of the D2-statistic of
Mahalanobis" (PDF). Sankhya. 55: 442459. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13
November 2013.
Jump up ^ Mahalanobis, P C (1927). "Analysis of race-mixture in Bengal". J. Proc.
Asiatic Soc. Bengal. 23: 301333.
Jump up ^ Mahalanobis, PC (1922). "Anthropological observations on the AngloIndians of Calcutta. Part I. Analysis of male stature.". Records of the Indian Museum.
23: 196.
Jump up ^ Mukharji, Projit Bihari (2016). "Profiling the profiloscope: Facialization of
race technologies and the rise of biometric nationalism in inter-war British India".
History and Technology. 31 (4): 376. doi:10.1080/07341512.2015.1127459.
Jump up ^ Rao, J. N. K. (2006) Interplay Between Sample Survey Theory and
Practice: An Appraisal. Survey Methodology Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 117138. Statistics
Canada, Catalogue No. 12-001 PDF
Jump up ^ Adhikari, B. P. (1990). Social construction of the statistical estimation of
crop yield. Paper presented at the XII World Congress of Sociology of the
Internutionul Sociologicul Associution, Madrid, Spain.
Jump up ^ Ghosh, J. K.; P. Maiti; T. J. Rao; B. K. Sinha (1999). "Evolution of Statistics
in India". Revue Internationale de Statistique. 67 (1): 1334. doi:10.2307/1403563.
JSTOR 1403563.
Jump up ^ The Hindu dated 15 May 2003

Jump up ^ Das, Gurucharan. 2000 India Unbound: The Social and Economic
Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age Anchor Books. pp. 432
ISBN 0-375-41164-X
Jump up ^ Royal Society citation
Jump up ^ The Statesman 25 December 2006
Jump up ^ Mohan, Rakesh 2007 Statistical system of India some reflections.
Reserve Bank of India, Department of Statistical Analysis and Computer Services,
Mumbai, 29 June 2007. PDF
Bibliography[edit]
Ashok Rudra (1996). Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography. Oxford University
Press. ISBN 978-0-19-563679-6.
A. Mahalanobis (1983). Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. National Book Trust, India.
External links[edit]
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GND: 120261804 SUDOC: 08057663X MGP: 47966 NLA: 36576600 BNE: XX1352419
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