Indian-American mathematician and statistician C R Rao has been awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics for his groundbreaking work over 75 years ago that transformed statistical thinking. The award, which is equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the field, comes with an $80,000 prize and will be presented to Rao, who is now 102 years old, in July at the International Statistical Institute World Statistics Congress in Canada. Guy Nason, chair of the International Prize in Statistics Foundation, hailed Rao’s work as having “not only revolutionized statistical thinking in its time but also continues to exert enormous influence on human understanding of science across a wide spectrum of disciplines.”

In his 1945 paper published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Rao demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for modern statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science today. The first result, the Cramer-Rao lower bound, enables knowing when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be. The second result, the Rao-Blackwell Theorem, transforms an estimate into an optimal one. The third result provided insights that pioneered the field of “information geometry,” which has found applications in advancements in artificial intelligence, data science, and image segregation.