Samarendra Nath Roy (11 December 1906 – 23 July 1964) was an Indian-born American mathematician and an applied statistician.

Early life

Roy was the first of three children of

Kali Nath Roy Kali Nath Roy (1878 – 9 December 1945) was a Bengali nationalist journalist and the Chief Editor of the newspaper '' The Tribune''. His son Samarendra Nath Roy was a mathematician and applied statistician. Early life Roy was born in 1878 at ...

and Suniti Bala Roy. His father, was a freedom fighter and the Chief Editor of the newspaper

The Tribune ''The Tribune'' or ''Tribune'' is the name of various newspapers: United States Daily California *''Oakland Tribune'' * ''The Tribune'' (San Luis Obispo) * ''The San Diego Union-Tribune'' *''San Gabriel Valley Tribune'' Indiana *''Kokomo Tribune' ...

, then publishing from

Lahore Lahore ( ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the Administrative units of Pakistan, Pakistani province of Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab. It is the List of cities in Pakistan by population, second-largest city in Pakistan, after Karachi, and ...

. Roy and The Tribune publishe
seven allegedly seditious articles from April 3, 1919 through April 11, 1919
leading up to the April 13th massacre of the Indians at the hands of the British in the infamous

Jallianwala Bagh massacre The Jallianwala Bagh massacre (), also known as the Amritsar massacre, took place on 13 April 1919. A large crowd had gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, British India, during the annual Vaisakhi, Baisakhi fair to protest aga ...

. For this "offence" Kali Nath Roy was sentenced to imprisonment of two years along with a fine of one thousand rupees. Roy secured first division in the Matriculation Examination in 1923 from the Khulna District School. He was the topper in the Intermediate Science (Higher Secondary) Examinations in 1925 from the Daulatpur Hindu Academy. He obtained first class and was the topper in both the BSc Mathematics (Honours) from Presidency College of the

University of Calcutta The University of Calcutta, informally known as Calcutta University (), is a Public university, public State university (India), state university located in Kolkata, Calcutta (Kolkata), West Bengal, India. It has 151 affiliated undergraduate c ...

in 1928 and the MSc in Mixed Mathematics - which later was renamed to Applied Mathematics - (with The Theory of Relativity as the elective) from the renowned

Rajabazar Science College The University College of Science, Technology and Agriculture (formerly known as Rajabazar Science College) are two of five main campuses of the University of Calcutta (CU). The college served as the cradle of Indian sciences, where Raman won t ...

in 1931.

Academic career

In 1931, when Roy joined the Department of Applied Mathematics of

at the University of Calcutta as a research associate, he used computing facilities at the newly established

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 ...

, which was founded by Professor P. C. Mahalanobis. Roy along with several talented young scholars including J. M. Sengupta, H. C. Sinha,

Raj Chandra Bose Raj Chandra Bose (or Basu) (19 June 1901 – 31 October 1987) was an Indian American mathematician and statistician best known for his work in design theory, finite geometry and the theory of error-correcting codes in which the class of BCH c ...

, K. R. Nair, K. Kishen and C. R. Rao, joined to form an active group of statisticians under Mahalanobis. Roy was one of the very early students of Mahalanobis, who initiated some of the early works in Statistics. He was well known for his pioneering contribution to multivariate statistical analysis, mainly that of the Jacobians of complicated transformations for various exact distributions, rectangular coordinates and the Bartlett decomposition. His dissertation included the Post master's work at the Indian Statistical Institute where he worked under Mahalanobis. It was Bose who first went to the United States as a visiting professor at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

and then joined the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

in 1947. Roy followed suit by later joining him at the

in the spring of 1950, after initially travelling to the United States to take up a Visiting Professorship of Statistics at

Columbia University in New York Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan, it ...

in the spring of 1949. In between this Roy returned to India and became Head of the Department of Statistics at the

during the academic year 1949–50. Roy joined Bose as full Professor of Statistics in the Statistics Department at the

. S. N. Roy had 15 doctorate students there from 1950 till 1963. To commemorate his Birth Centenary an International Conference on "Multivariate Statistical Methods in the 21st Century: The Legacy of Prof. S.N. Roy" was held at Kolkata, India during 28–29 December 2006. The Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference published a special issue for celebrating the Centennial of Birth of S. N. Roy.

Personal life

Roy was married to Bani Roy and had four children, Prabir, Subir, Tapon and Sunanda. He died while on holiday in Jasper, Canada.

Selected publications

* Potthoff, R. F. and Roy, S. N. (1964), "A generalized multivariate analysis of variance model useful especially for growth curve problems", Biometrika, vol. 51, pp. 313–326. * Roy, S. N. (1957), "Some Aspects of Multivariate Analysis", New York: Wiley. * Roy, S. N. and Sarhan, A. E. (1956), "On inverting a class of patterned matrices", Biometrika, 43, 227–231.

Selected Ph.D. dissertations under Roy's guidance

* Olkin, Ingram (1951). "On distribution problems in

multivariate analysis Multivariate statistics is a subdivision of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one outcome variable, i.e., '' multivariate random variables''. Multivariate statistics concerns understanding the differ ...

". * Pachares, James (1953). "On the distribution of

quadratic forms In mathematics, a quadratic form is a polynomial with terms all of degree two (" form" is another name for a homogeneous polynomial). For example, 4x^2 + 2xy - 3y^2 is a quadratic form in the variables and . The coefficients usually belong to ...

". * Pillai, K.C. Sreedharan (1954). "On some distribution problems in

". * Mitra, Sujit Kumar (1956). "Contributions to the statistical analysis of

categorical data In statistics, a categorical variable (also called qualitative variable) is a variable (research), variable that can take on one of a limited, and usually fixed, number of possible values, assigning each individual or other unit of observation to a ...

". * Gnanadesikan, Ramanathan (1957). "Contributions to

including

univariate In mathematics, a univariate object is an expression (mathematics), expression, equation, function (mathematics), function or polynomial involving only one Variable (mathematics), variable. Objects involving more than one variable are ''wikt:multi ...

and multivariate

variance In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expected value of the squared deviation from the mean of a random variable. The standard deviation (SD) is obtained as the square root of the variance. Variance is a measure of dispersion ...

components analysis and

factor analysis Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. For example, it is possible that variations in six observe ...

". * Potthoff, Richard F. (1958). "Multi-dimensional incomplete block designs". * Diadmond, Earl L. (1958). "Asymptotic power and independence of certain classes of tests on categorical data". * Bargman, Rolf (1958). "A study of independence and dependence in multivariate normal analysis". * Cobb, Whitfield (1959). "Studies in univariate and multivariate variance components analysis connected with sampling from a finite population". * Bhapkar, Vasant P. (1959). "Contributions to the statistical analysis of experiments with one or more responses". * Sathe, Yashawande S. (1962). "Studies in certain types of nonparametric inference". * Das Gupta, Somesh (1963). "Some problems in classification". * Mudholkar, Govind S. (1963). "Some contributions to the theory of univariate and multivariate statistical analysis". Sources:

Recognition

* Fellow 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 ...

* Fellow of the

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. At a meeting of the Jubilee Meeting of the Royal Statistical Society, statisticians met and formed the agreed statues of the International Statistical ...

in 1951 * President of the Statistical Section of the

Indian Science Congress Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) is a premier scientific organisation of India with headquarters at Kolkata, West Bengal. The association started in the year 1914 in Calcutta and it meets annually in the first week of January. It h ...

in 1948 * Fellow of The National Institute of Sciences (FNASc), India (now known as the

Indian National Science Academy The Indian National Science Academy (INSA) is a national academy in New Delhi New Delhi (; ) is the Capital city, capital of India and a part of the Delhi, National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three b ...

) in 1946

References

External links

Indian Statistical Institute (ISI)

International Conference on Multivariate Statistical Methods in the 21st Century: The Legacy of Prof. S.N. Roy

Samarendra Nath Roy: An Appreciation

{{DEFAULTSORT:Roy, S. N. 1906 births 1964 deaths Indian statisticians Bengali mathematicians 20th-century Indian mathematicians Academic staff of the University of Calcutta University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty Scientists from Kolkata University of Calcutta alumni Academic staff of the Indian Statistical Institute Binghamton University faculty Indian emigrants to the United States