Career begins at 60

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, a prominent Indian-American mathematician and statistician, will receive the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the field, for his monumental work 75 years ago that revolutionised statistical thinking.

Rao’s work, more than 75 years ago, continues to exert a profound influence on science, the International Prize in Statistics Foundation said in a statement.

Rao, who is now 102, will receive the prize, which comes with a $80,000 award, this July at the biennial International Statistical Institute World Statistics Congress in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

The first, now known as the Cramer-Rao lower bound, provides a means for knowing when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be, it said.

The second result, named the Rao-Blackwell Theorem (because it was discovered independently by eminent statistician David Blackwell), provides a means for transforming an estimate into a better—in fact, an optimal—estimate. Together, these results form a foundation on which much of statistics is built, the statement said.

And the third result provided insights that pioneered a new interdisciplinary field that has flourished as “information geometry.” Combined, these results help scientists more efficiently extract information from data, the statement added.

Information geometry has recently been used to aid the understanding and optimization of Higgs boson measurements at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

It has also found applications in recent research on radars and antennas and contributed significantly to advancements in artificial intelligence, data science, signal processing, shape classification, and image segregation.

The Rao-Blackwell process has been applied to stereology, particle filtering, and computational econometrics, among others, while the Cramer-Rao lower bound is of great importance in such diverse fields as signal processing, spectroscopy, radar systems, multiple image radiography, risk analysis, and quantum physics.

Now at 102 He is currently a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao has received many honours. He was awarded the title of Padma Bhushan by the Indian Government (1968) and Padma Vibhushan in 2001.

What does it tell ?

1. Life after 60 is not at all dull and boring
2. You can achieve expertise in whichever field you are passionate about.
3. Your energy level has to be limitless
4. Just focus on positive things in life leaving out negative vibes
5. Take care of your health and keep your mind and body occupied with work.