Chaitra H. Nagaraja

Author’s Note: As the daughter and niece of statisticians, I have spent a lifetime entrenched in the world of statistics. Consequently, I had the privilege of meeting Rao on several occasions. Not only was he an outstanding statistician, he was a warm and encouraging person as well.

Last year, the scientific world lost one of its preeminent statisticians, Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao. Much has already been written about his more famous results: the Cramér—Rao lower bound; the Rao–Blackwell Theorem; and information geometry (The August 2021 issue of the International Statistical Review provides a good primer). This memorial column will connect two applied publications Rao worked on early in his career to modern data science:

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