Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis

• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis 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.
• Mahalanobis has been considered the father of modern statistics in India.

• June 29 2018, is the 125th birth anniversary of Professor Mahalanobis.
• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis spent most of his extra time in England in the library of King’s College, Cambridge, where a tutor introduced him to Biometrika, a leading book on theoretical statistics of the time.

Notable Works

• PCM acted as a pioneer in the study of statistics in India by establishing the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), and laid the foundations of the Indian statistical system through the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) and the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO).
• when the first statistical institute was established in the US under the leadership of Gertrude Cox, ISI was used as the model.
• In Calcutta, Prasanta Chandra established a statistical laboratory in Presidency College in the early 1920s.
• Prasanta had established Sankhya, the Indian Journal of Statistics, a word that means both ‘determinate knowledge’ and ‘number’.
• In 1926, he analyzed 60 years’ data related to floods in Orissa, which led to the construction, after three decades, of the Hirakud dam on the Mahanadi.
• Peter Hall, one of the most celebrated statisticians of the modern era, attributed the origins of ‘Bootstrap’, perhaps the most powerful technique of modern statistics, to research by Mahalanobis in the 1930s and 1940s.
• SR Srinivasa Varadhan, the only Indian-origin winner of the Abel Prize, the so-called Mathematics Nobel, completed his Ph.D. from ISI in 1959.

Credits: The Indian Express

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