A man recognized as one of the world’s greatest statisticians is dead at the age of 102.
The University of Buffalo reports Calyampudi Rao died last week shortly after winning the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the Nobel Prize in his field.
As a man who mastered the numbers, he’d be happy to know he beat the odds. Less than one in 5,000 people in the U.S. lives beyond a hundred and about 85% of them are women.
“Dr. Rao was not only a groundbreaking mathematical statistician who revolutionized his field, but also that rare individual possessed of both genius intellect and profound humility,” said President Satish K. Tripathi. “It was a tremendous honor to count him as a member of UB’s faculty, and his tenure at our university served as the capstone to an extraordinary career spanning, remarkably, 80 years.
He would have been 103 next month. His daughter told Buffalo News that he died in hospice care at her Amherst home in New York.
Born in India, he moved to Buffalo in 2010 to be with his daughter and joined the University of Buffalo that same year. He had previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University.
“He exited with such grace, the same way he lived his life,” his daughter, Teja, said.
The International Prize in Statistics Foundation said Rao’s “work more than 75 years ago continues to exert a profound influence on science,” saying his research released in 1945 “paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science today,” reported American Kahani.
Rao also successfully overcame caste discrimination to rise to the top of his field.
His death is being felt in his entire professional community.
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