Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, FRS known as C R Rao is an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He is currently professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo.
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, FRS known as C R Rao is an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He is currently professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao has been honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002. The American Statistical Association has described him as “a living legend whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine.” The Times of India listed Rao as one of the top 10 Indian scientists of all time. Rao is also a Senior Policy and Statistics advisor for the Indian Heart Association non-profit focused on raising South Asian cardiovascular disease awareness

C. R. Rao was the eighth of the ten children born to a Telugu family in Hadagali, Bellary, in Karnataka, India. His schooling was completed in Gudur, Nuzvid, Nandigama, and Visakhapatnam, all in the present state of Andhra Pradesh. He received an MSc in mathematics from Andhra University and an MA in statistics from Calcutta University in 1943 He obtained a PhD degree at King’s College in Cambridge University under R. A. Fisher in 1948, to which he added a Sc.D. degree, also from Cambridge, in 1965.
Rao first worked at the Indian Statistical Institute and the Anthropological Museum in Cambridge. Later he held several important positions, as the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor and National Professor in India, University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Eberly Professor and Chair of Statistics and Director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis at Pennsylvania State University.
Among his best-known discoveries are the Cramér–Rao bound and the Rao–Blackwell theorem both related to the quality of estimators.Other areas he worked in include multivariate analysis, estimation theory, and differential geometry. His other contributions include the Fisher–Rao theorem, Rao distance, and orthogonal arrays. He is the author of 14 books and has published over 400 journal publications.
Rao has received 38 honorary doctoral degrees from universities in 19 countries around the world and numerous awards .