C.R. Rao: A Life in Statistics (2020) | Hacker News Reader

C.R. Rao: A Life in Statistics (2020)

bhavana.org.in

158 pointsakbarnama17 comments

> This was because of the monetary denomination of the Indian rupee at the time, where 16 Annas made a Rupee, 12 Kanis made an Anna and 4 Dammidies made a Kani.

I had a vague idea about Annas and never knew about the other two, but I realize have encountered shadows of all of these growing up.

My vague understanding of annas came from 25 paisa and 50 paisa coins being a thing, and being called நாலணா (4 annas) and எட்டணா (8 annas).

Kani I assume is காணி, and finally I understand what Bharathiyar was asking for when he asked "காணி நிலம் வேண்டும்" ("my wish is for meagre land worth a mere Kani").

Dammidi must be தம்படி, and survives mostly as an insult: "தம்படி பெறாது" = "this thing is not even worth a Dammidi".

Bharathiyar was asking for about 1.32 acres of land https://thakavalkalangiam.blogspot.com/2013/03/blog-post_953...

Thanks. I'd assumed he was going for the humble, ascetic, "I don't need much" intent, but I should have known that isn't Bharatiyar's style! Asking for 1.32 acres fits better with the rest of the poem where Bharati doesn't hold back from expressing his (pretty reasonable) wants.

> Dammidi must be தம்படி, and survives mostly as an insult.

Ha! It survives as in insult in Telugu too: "He doesn't have an income of even a dammidi."

Same for Marathi.

Extremely humble in this statement. He was hugely influential in statistics (Cramer-Rao lower bound, etc) and somewhat recently his work was also quite relevant to RL, eg with Rao-Blackwellization of gradient estimators.

Also diffusion models [1,2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rao%E2%80%93Blackwell_theorem

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11239

CR Rao just passed last week at age 102

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37237240

@mods, could this get bumped?

It would be great if Dang or a moderator or probably the poster of this post could update the title to reflect that he passed away a few days ago.

Always used to think about him while travelling on this beautiful road in Hyderabad.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Professor+CR+Rao+Rd,+Hyder...

One of the few times I've seen roads named after academicians and scientists.

IIRC, the statistics department in the UoH is also named after him.

edit: fixed typo

CERN campus in Geneva is full of roads named after physicists: https://goo.gl/maps/t1x4MBXwXKE1mdGb9

but I guess those are more internal roads :P

Irvine, California! Michelson Dr, Millikan Ave, Von Karman Ave, Kelvin Ave. And Millikan runs parallel to Hale and Noyes.

These streets named after scientists are easily the most interesting thing about living in Irvine.

Amazing works and life! How I wish other mathematicians like Ramanujan and Mirzakhani lived such a long life.

In my unbiased estimation, his work offered better than a minimum variance of contributions to the field! <3 :')))) ;)))) ;')

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