Indian-American mathematician Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao will receive the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, known to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of statistics.

C R Rao has been awarded the top prize for his monumental work 75 years ago that revolutionised statistical thinking. The International Prize in Statistics Foundation in a statement said that Rao's work, more than 75 years ago, continues to exert a profound influence on science.

In his breakthrough 1945 paper published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Rao demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science today, the Foundation said in a statement.

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 an optimal one. 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.

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.

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