Raghu Raj Bahadur (30 April 1924 – 7 June 1997) was an Indian

statistician A statistician is a person who works with Theory, theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private sector, private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, a ...

considered by peers to be "one of the architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics".

Biography

Bahadur was born in

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, but spread chiefly to the west, or beyond its Bank (geography ...

, India, and received his BA (1943) and MA (1945) in mathematics from

St. Stephen’s College St. Stephen's College is a constituent college of Delhi University. It awards both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Established in 1881, it is one of the oldest liberal arts and sciences colleges in India. The college has an acceptance r ...

University of Delhi The Delhi University (DU, ISO 15919, ISO: ), also and officially known as the University of Delhi, is a collegiate university, collegiate research university, research Central university (India), central university located in Delhi, India. It ...

. He received his doctorate from the

University of North Carolina The University of North Carolina is the Public university, public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referre ...

under

Herbert Robbins Herbert Ellis Robbins (January 12, 1915 – February 12, 2001) was an American mathematician and statistician. He did research in topology, measure theory, statistics, and a variety of other fields. He was the co-author, with Richard Courant ...

in 1950 after which he joined

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

. He worked as a research statistician at the

Indian Statistical Institute The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a public research university headquartered in Kolkata, India with centers in New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Tezpur. It was declared an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India und ...

in Calcutta from 1956 to 1961. He spent the remainder of his academic career in the

. He was a cousin to

Madhur Jaffrey Madhur Jaffrey Order of the British Empire, CBE (née Bahadur; born 13 August 1933) is an Indian-born British-American actress, cookbook and travel writer, and television personality. She is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the weste ...

Contributions

He published numerous papers and is best known for the concepts of " Bahadur efficiency" and the Bahadur–Ghosh–Kiefer representation (with

J. K. Ghosh Jayanta Kumar Ghosh (Bengali: জয়ন্ত কুমার ঘোষ, 23 May 1937 – 30 September 2017) was an Indian statistician, an emeritus professor at Indian Statistical Institute and a professor of statistics at Purdue University. ...

and Jack Kiefer). He also framed the Anderson–Bahadur algorithmClassification into two

multivariate normal distribution In probability theory and statistics, the multivariate normal distribution, multivariate Gaussian distribution, or joint normal distribution is a generalization of the one-dimensional ( univariate) normal distribution to higher dimensions. One d ...

s with different

covariance matrices In probability theory and statistics, a covariance matrix (also known as auto-covariance matrix, dispersion matrix, variance matrix, or variance–covariance matrix) is a square matrix giving the covariance between each pair of elements of a ...

(1962), T W Anderson, R R Bahadur, ''Annals of Mathematical Statistics'' along with

Theodore Wilbur Anderson Theodore Wilbur Anderson (June 5, 1918 – September 17, 2016) was an American mathematician and statistician who specialized in the analysis of multivariate data. Life and career He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was on the facu ...

which is used in statistics and engineering for solving binary classification problems when the underlying data have

s with different covariance matrices.

Legacy

He held the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1968–69) and was the 1974 Wald Lecturer of the IMS. He was the President of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts ...

during 1974–75 and was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

in 1986.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bahadur, Raghu Raj 1924 births 1997 deaths Indian statisticians 20th-century Indian mathematicians American statisticians 20th-century American mathematicians Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics University of Chicago faculty American academics of Indian descent Scientists from Delhi Indian emigrants to the United States Mathematical statisticians