C.R.

Rao
C.R. Rao is a great name from the golden age of statistics. His
work was done in India; his intellect shaped statistics worldwide.
Julian Champkin talked to him in London.

The need for knowing the three R’s, reading, before he was 26, even before he did his PhD, which
writing and arithmetic, is well understood. These means before he set foot outside Indian soil. He spent
do not take us far unless we acquire the fourth R, most of his working life at the Indian Statistical Insti-
reasoning under uncertainty, for taking decisions tute (ISI), where he stayed for a period of over 40 years,
in real life. shaping Indian statistics as well as influencing world
(C.R. Rao, Statistics and Truth, p. 163) statistics; he only began his US tenures at an age when
most people retire.
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was 91 when he came All of which gives him a different career structure,
to London earlier this year to receive the Guy Medal in and a different life path, from most great names in statis-
Gold from the Royal Statistical Society. The first thing tics. He was born in 1920 in British India, the India of
you notice about him at that ceremony is that he is a
family man. His wife Bhargavi and an extended family
of some 30 sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews and
nieces all assembled in London to see the presentation.
(Forgive me if I missed some.) His daughter Tejaswini
is a dancer; when she performs in public Rao supervises
the performances, the music, the introductions, the
lighting. His son Veerendra studied engineering at
Pittsburgh University. That was partly what tempted
Rao to accept the offer of a professorial post there. He is
a nonagenarian paterfamilias.
His age makes him part – a highly significant
part – of a different generation of statisticians. “It was
an important generation for statistics”, wrote Bradley
Efron. “The first half of the century was the golden age
of statistical theory, during which our field grew from ad
hoc origins … into a firmly grounded mathematical sci-
ence. Men of the intellectual calibre of Fisher, Neyman,
Pearson, Hotelling, Cramér and Rao were needed to do
it.” Of that list Rao is the only survivor. More remark-
ably, he is a working survivor as well.
There is another difference about him. There are
many eminent statisticians of Indian origin. A large
number of those have done their key work in universi-
ties in America, Europe or the Far East. Rao has indeed
been tenured outside India, at Pittsburgh and at Penn
State; his PhD, back in 1948, was from Cambridge. But
his key work – the stuff that students are taught, the
theorems with “Rao-” or “ –Rao” in their names, such
as Rao-Blackwellization, the Cramér–Rao bound and
getting on for a dozen others – was mostly completed

© 2011 The Royal Statistical Society december2011 175

the Raj. He was the eighth of ten children; two
older brothers did not survive infancy. “When
the third son was born, my parents placed him
on top of a rubbish heap; there was a belief that
this would make the boy strong and help him
to survive”, says Rao. It worked. The child was
named Thippanna – Thippa means “rubbish”
– and ended up as Chief Security Officer of
the Indian Railways. Another brother became
a doctor. The eighth-born is our statistician.
His given name is Radhakrishna (the god
Krishna in mythology is also an eighth child).
The family name is Calyampudi. “Again it is
the custom for a further name to be added to
all male children.” Hence the Rao, shared also
by his brothers.
Rao – his father, a policeman, eventually
a police inspector; his background, small land-
owners – grew up well-off by the standards of
the time. “But I was the first generation of my
family to be educated”, he says. “In my father’s
time the tradition was to obtain the minimum
qualification that was needed for a job.” Nev- Family photograph with his father (centre) and mother (holding child). C.R. Rao is cross-legged, third from
ertheless it was a family that took education the left
very seriously indeed – for the male members
at least. His sisters remained unschooled, but
wielded their intellect and influence through times tables, up to 20 times 20.” When his the Indian Statistical Institute; Rao had not
marriage. Toyshops, in his memory, sold only father eventually retired the family settled in hitherto heard of it. The student took Rao to
dolls, for girls; boys were expected to study. “An Vishakapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, mainly the Institute – which was three rooms in the
abiding memory is of my mother, lighting an chosen on the grounds of its good schools and Physics Department of the Presidency Col-
oil lamp at four o’clock every morning for me university. Rao obtained his first degree, in lege – and showed him a research paper he had
so that I could study at a time when my mind mathematics, from Andhra University at the written. “I felt that I could write such papers”, he
would be fresh, not tired out at the end of a age of 19. says. “So I decided at once to join the Institute
day”, he says. A job, or research work, should have for ‘training in statistics’, whatever it involved.”
Another factor loomed large in the India followed. Instead came a period of disap- The opportunity had come by chance but
of that time – that of caste. His forebears pointments. He applied for a research post; Rao picked it up and ran with it. “I had chosen
were landowners; they were not Brahmins. he was rejected because, unknown to him, his statistics as a last resort; I have never turned
Some of his school-fellows were. “I would application arrived after the closing date. A back”, he says.
not be allowed into Brahmin homes. Some more sympathetic administrator might have The ISI at that time consisted of the
would allow me into the courtyard, or to the turned a blind eye – particularly since Rao was famous P.C. Mahalanobis – at the ISI known
front steps. If I was thirsty on the way home the only applicant. simply as “The Professor” – and around 15
my friends were allowed to pour water into It was 1942, and the war was on. It was “technical workers” who did the teaching
my cupped hands outside, but not into a cup, the time of the campaign in the Western and some research. The teaching was at
because my touching it would have polluted Desert. He applied for a job in the army survey first disorganised and poor. Textbooks were
it for them and made it unusable.” In the class unit and travelled 1500 km to Calcutta for non-existent. Teachers therefore read original
photograph on page 178 the little boys in interview. All decisions so far had been in papers and turned them into teaching mate-
the second row sitting on chairs are Brahmin consultation with his family. His father had rial – a method which might have added qual-
boys; those cross-legged on the ground are died not long before, but it was unthinkable ity. Mahalanobis, of course, was the towering
not. Rao is second from the left – on the not to continue that respectful tradition. So figure: distant, autocratic, but well able to see
ground. when he was asked whether would he go to talent and to nurture it.
His father’s job meant that the family North Africa if required, Rao’s answer was “I Staff members would disappear down the
moved frequently as his father was assigned would ask my mother” – which he says now corridor into his office for what were referred
to different postings; Rao did not attend “may have been the wrong answer”. to only as “discussions with The Professor.”
any school for more than two years running. However, statistics is all about chance; Much later Rao discovered that the “discus-
Nevertheless he did well. “I remember being and here chance took a hand. In the hotel in sions” were more often about the organisation
called up in front of the class to recite the Calcutta he met a student who was training at of the ISI than about statistics.

176 december2011
 He had been admitted to the one-year
training programme, which turned after six
months, when the ISI linked up with Calcutta
University, into a master’s degree. Rao was
therefore among the first five students to
receive an MA in statistics from any Indian
university.
After qualifying he stayed on at the ISI
as a “technical apprentice” to teach – and to
do research. As a teacher he was evidently
popular. India was moving towards independ-
ence. In class one day news came of police
shootings at a demonstration and an appeal for
blood donors. As he tells it in the pages of his
biography by Nalini Krishnankutty1, on which
I have drawn extensively, “It suddenly occurred
to me that I should donate blood. I had never
done this. I was afraid of injections. I told the
students that I was suspending the class, and
headed to the hospital. When I was standing
in line to donate my blood I turned round and
found my entire class standing in line behind
me….”
He not only taught, he researched; and
the research of the “technical apprentice” beat
that of any professor in the world.
It included what is now known as the
Cramér–Rao inequality. “I was teaching a
class the error in an estimate of an unknown
quantity from observed data. Fisher had
shown there is a lower limit to this error, if
the sample size is very large. A student put
up his hand and asked if there was a similar
limit when the sample is small, as would very
likely be in practice. I said I would try to find
out.” He worked out the result that night, and
answered the student the next morning. This
was in 1943. Due to wartime restrictions it
could not be published until1945, in the Bulle-
tin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society. It was
Jerzy Neyman who linked Rao’s name with
Cramér’s. Cramér, isolated by war in Sweden,
had done similar work.
The Blackwell–Rao theorem was a simi-
lar conjunction of names and of work done
independently. Rao devised it first – it too was
published in his 1945 paper – but neglected
to include it in the introduction, which led
to its being overlooked or to the assumption
that Rao had not realised its importance. “It
was my first paper, and I was not aware that
the introduction is generally written for the
benefit of those who do not want to read
the paper.” Blackwell published in 1947. The
names got combined a few years later by the
statistician Joseph Berkson. “When I told
Berkson that I had discovered it ahead of
Blackwell, he said that he was not aware of it,
but that “Blackwellization” was easier on the
tongue than ‘Raoization’”. He made amends
by christening it the Rao–Blackwell theorem,
“presumably in that order so that one could
speak of Rao-Blackwellization rather than
Blackwell-Raoization”, says Rao.
Rao was also set to practical tasks. One
assignment involved anthropology. The Indian
census of 1941, attempting to work out af-
finities between ethnic groups, had taken some
anthropomorphic measurements of some
5000 individuals from 23 castes and tribes.
Nine measurements, such as height and head
length and breadth, were taken from each. Rao
was given the task of classifying them into
groups so that any two populations within a
group resembled each other more than they
resembled a population in another group. It
was, in other words, multivariate analysis. Rao
used the concept of Mahalanobis distance for
this, which must have pleased his superior.
When a short time later Mahalanobis received
a request from Cambridge for the services of a
statistician and an anthropologist to work on a
special project, Rao was the statistician he sent.
And so the young man arrived at Cam-
bridge. The work was at the Museum of Ar-
chaeology and Ethnology, categorising skulls
from 1000-year-old graves in Jebel Moya in the
Sudan. It was to result in a PhD, new methods
for multivariate analysis in pattern recognition,
and a co-authored book. But Rao was rather
busier than even that might imply. He enrolled
as a research scholar at King’s College, and
approached the great Dr Fisher (whom he had
met when Fisher visited the ISI in 1944) to be
his supervisor. Fisher agreed – but “suggested”
that Rao gain experience by assisting him in
Fisher’s genetics lab – which in practice meant
cross- and inter-breeding mice to isolate gene
lines to study genetic linkages. The museum
assignment was a full-time one; so, more or
less, was the work in Fisher’s lab. So it was
skulls in the daytime, followed by mating,
feeding and observing mice in what was left
of the afternoons and the evenings, and then
studying for his PhD in, presumably, whatever
time was left to him.
The mouse research was into the links
between the recessive genes that are respon-
sible for coat colour, kinky tail, ruffled hair
and disposition to shake all the time. The only
part of it that he did not like was killing the
unwanted strains; he got a fellow-student to
do that for him. Nevertheless he was so keen
to study the newborn litters that one day when
he found Fisher’s lab locked he broke into it.
For Rao, Fisher was another Mahalano-
bis – a mentor, a powerful man, an autocrat.
The two professors had their similarities. Both
Fisher and Mahalanobis were aware of their
status. Both were intolerant of disagreement.
Both cherished enmities. To Rao, both were
great and helping influences and guides.
“Fisher and Mahalanobis were guiding
forces in my life” says Rao. “Fisher believed in
the scrutiny of data. He would say ‘The first
task of a statistician is to cross-examine his
data’.” Rao calls this “making figures speak”.
Fisher he found the more approachable of the
two. Mahalanobis, he says, sometimes gave
the impression of being a strategist who did
not place all his cards on the table. But “had
it not been for those traits his intellect might
have blossomed only in some isolated garden
and faded. Developing statistics in India was
like exploring a new territory. It needed a
pioneer and an adventurer. He saw statistics as
a means to knowledge, to understand nature
and especially to combat the two evils of our
country, poverty and superstition. Probably
Mahalanobis’ greatest contribution was to tell
people that statistics is not abstract but a very
applied subject.” Fisher had a similar take. Rao
once showed Fisher a paper he had written.
Fisher thumbed through it. “I was looking for
numerical work in your paper and I did not
find any. I can understand others’ contribu-
tions not by looking at the imposing formulae
displayed in the paper but by examining what
the formulae can do to real data in extracting
information.”
Rao’s PhD from Cambridge came in
1948. By then he already had 40 published
papers to his name. He had devised Rao’s
score test, which grew into the Neyman–Rao
test; he had developed orthogonal arrays,
which were used by Genichi Taguchi to
revolutionise Japanese industrial produc-
tion; he had applied differential geometry to
probability distributions, decades ahead of
its time; the resulting Fisher–Rao metric,
and Rao distances, developments of the
Mahalanobis distance, have come into their
own in recent years with applications as di-
verse as economics and image processing. The
quantum Cramér–Rao bound is used, obvi-
ously, in quantum physics; and still the list
is not exhausted. You can add, for example,
the Lehmann–Scheffé–Rao theorem, Rao’s
december2011 177
F-test, and the Hamming–Rao bound, which
is used in cryptography. “The 1940s were un-
grudgingly Rao’s”, wrote Terry Speed, writing
of the history of statistics. “His 1945 paper,
which contains the Cramér–Rao bound,
Rao–Blackwell theorem, and the beginning
of differential geometry of parameter space
will guarantee that even had he done nothing
else – but there was much else.”
1948 was also the year in which he
returned to Calcutta and to the ISI. At the ISI
there was just one professor – Mahalanobis.
Everyone else was a “technical worker” or at
best a “superintending statistician”. At around
this time the system changed. Grant money
from the Indian government was forthcoming
– the ISI had survived until then by charging
state governments for doing survey and ana-
lytical work for them. Under the new regime
Mahalanobis was intending to create two
further professorships and to make Rao an as-
sistant professor. But his two prime candidates
for professorship left to work in America.
Mahalanobis rewarded Rao’s loyalty with the
only full professorship that he granted. Rao
was 28 at the time. He stayed at the ISI for
another 30 years.
He was teaching, researching, admin-
istering, creating syllabuses, developing the
Institute. The ISI was held in such regard
that Prime Minister Nehru frequently held
meetings with Mahalanobis and Rao; much
School photograph taken at Nuzvid, Andhra Pradesh, in 1929. C.R. Rao, wearing a dark jacket, is first on the
left in the bottom row
178 december2011
of India’s five-year plan was developed under
their guidance. “His work there put India not
far from the centre of the statistical map of the
world, long before statistics was recognised as
a separate discipline of study at universities.”
That is what Rao said about Mahalanobis. It
applies equally to Rao himself. For a while,
more than half the qualified statisticians work-
ing in the world were Indians, as R.A. Fisher
noted in a speech to the ISI; most of them
were Rao’s students.
In teaching he did not limit himself to
the research students nor to the more able; nor
indeed to statistics. “I would substitute for any
teacher who was away. Once I found a teacher-
less class that should have been learning Eng-
lish grammar and rhetoric. I set the students
each to find 12 words ending in -ade.” The
Institute was built round gardens with a fine
pond. Any student with a problem would take
it to Rao, to be discussed as the pair walked
round and round the pond. This was referred
to, very happily, as “pondering”.
His exam-setting techniques are also
worth noting. “They were not tricky, but you
could not do them unless you understood the
fundamentals. There was no time limit. If they
went past lunch or teatime he would simply
arrange for the students to be served with
samosas and tea”, wrote one student.
And he continued research. “Research is
like a drug”, he says. “Once you find that you
can do something creative, you continue doing
it.”
International recognition was rapid. In-
vitations to lecture abroad flowed in. In 1953
came a year’s visiting professorship at Urbana,
Illinois – since they could not afford air fares
for two, Bhargavi went ahead by ship, Rao fol-
lowing later by plane. He was elected FRS in
1967. In 1972, after the death of Mahalanobis,
he succeeded him as Director of the ISI; five
years later he moved to Delhi as Jawaharlal
Nehru Professor.
He spent the summer of 1978 as a visiting
professor at Pittsburgh. Chance again took a
hand. Rao gave a lecture there for a general
audience. It was heard by the dean, who offered
him a job. As it happened, Rao’s son Veerendra
had applied to study engineering at Pittsburgh
and children of Pittsburgh professors were
exempted from tuition fees. Rao, who had
turned down many lucrative foreign offers to
remain in India, was now aged 59; he took
the job, intending it to be temporary only; he
stayed at Pittsburgh for 9 years before becom-
ing Eberly Professor of Statistics at Penn State
University.
Rao-Blackwellization and Cramér–Rao
bounds sound forbidding to a non-statistician,
but Rao believes in statistics as a practical
subject, and some of his researches are very
practical indeed. In India he would supervise
the gardeners in the grounds of the ISI; at
Pittsburgh he attempted comparative experi-
ments to discover whether Indian vegetables
would grow as well there as in India – an
attempt frustrated when his wife served up
his test specimens as part of the dinner menu
to some guests. He has investigated whether
right-hand or left-hand turning cowpeas – a
climber that grows by twisting round its
support – give a better yield, by painstakingly
untwisting left-twisting plants to try to get
them to climb to the right, but the specimens
obstinately insisted on undoing themselves
and revolving clockwise again.
He divides his time between the United
States and India, where his latest project is the
creation of a museum of statistics. It will stand
on a 5-acre site donated by the University of
Hyderabad. The foundation stone was laid in
March this year. The professor keeps busy.
Reference
1. 1 Krishnankutty, N. (1996) Putting
Chance to Work; A Life in Statistics: A Biography of
C.R. Rao. State College, PA: Dialogue.