Montreal - Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, a prominent Indian-American mathematician and statistician, will receive the International Prize in Statistics 2023, which is equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the field. Rao is being honored for his seminal work that revolutionized statistical thinking more than 75 years ago. The prize comes with an award of USD 80,000 and will be presented to Rao, who is now 102, at the biennial International Statistical Institute World Statistics Congress in Ottawa, Canada, in July.

Rao's work demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science today. His work on the Cramer-Rao lower bound, Rao-Blackwell Theorem, and information geometry has found applications in various fields such as particle physics, artificial intelligence, and data science. Born in Karnataka, India, Rao received an MSc in mathematics and an MA in statistics from Andhra and Calcutta University, respectively, and a PhD degree from King's College at Cambridge University.