Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was born in Hadagali, Madras Presidency (modern Karnataka), India, the eighth of ten children. He earned master's degrees in mathematics and statistics from Andhra University and Calcutta University before completing his PhD at King's College, Cambridge, under geneticist and statistician Ronald Fisher in 1948.

In 1945, at the age of twenty-four, Rao published a single paper in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society that contained three foundational results in modern mathematical statistics: the Cramér-Rao inequality (defining the fundamental lower bound on the variance of an estimator), the Rao-Blackwell theorem (which transforms any estimator into an optimal estimator), and differential geometric approaches to probability distributions (information geometry). Rao served as director of the Indian Statistical Institute for four decades, establishing India as a global power in statistical science. He later held endowed chairs at Penn State and the University of Buffalo, receiving the US National Medal of Science in 2002 and the 2023 International Prize in Statistics (the "Nobel of statistics") at age 102.