Jayanta Kumar Ghosh (Bengali: জয়ন্ত কুমার ঘোষ, 23 May 1937 – 30 September 2017) was an Indian

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

, an

emeritus professor ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Indian Statistical Institute Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a higher education and research institute which is recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the 1959 act of the Indian parliament. It grew out of the Statistical Laboratory set up by Prasanta ...

and a professor of statistics at

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

Education

He obtained a

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...

from Presidency College, then affiliated with the

University of Calcutta The University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University; CU) is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate State university (India), state university in India, located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Considered ...

, and subsequently a

M.A. A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

and a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from the

under the supervision of H. K. Nandi. He started his research career in the early 1960s, studying

sequential analysis In statistics, sequential analysis or sequential hypothesis testing is statistical analysis where the sample size is not fixed in advance. Instead data are evaluated as they are collected, and further sampling is stopped in accordance with a pre- ...

as a graduate student in the department of statistics at the

Research

Among his best-known discoveries are the Bahadur–Ghosh–Kiefer representation (with R. R. Bahadur and Jack Kiefer) and the Ghosh–Pratt identity along with

John W. Pratt John Winsor Pratt (born 1931) is Emeritus William Ziegler (industrialist), William Ziegler professor business administration at Harvard University. His former education was conducted at Princeton University, Princeton and Stanford University, Stan ...

. His research contributions fall within the fields of: *

Bayesian inference Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, a ...

Asymptotics In mathematical analysis, asymptotic analysis, also known as asymptotics, is a method of describing limiting behavior. As an illustration, suppose that we are interested in the properties of a function as becomes very large. If , then as bec ...

Modeling A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a measure. Models c ...

and

model selection Model selection is the task of selecting a statistical model from a set of candidate models, given data. In the simplest cases, a pre-existing set of data is considered. However, the task can also involve the design of experiments such that the ...

* High dimensional data analysis *

Nonparametric regression Nonparametric regression is a category of regression analysis in which the predictor does not take a predetermined form but is constructed according to information derived from the data. That is, no parametric form is assumed for the relationship ...

and

density estimation In statistics, probability density estimation or simply density estimation is the construction of an estimate, based on observed data, of an unobservable underlying probability density function. The unobservable density function is thought of ...

Survival analysis Survival analysis is a branch of statistics for analyzing the expected duration of time until one event occurs, such as death in biological organisms and failure in mechanical systems. This topic is called reliability theory or reliability analysi ...

* Statistical genetics

Awards and honors

* Elected member of the International Statistical Institute * Advisory editor, ''Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference'' * Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

* Fellow of the

Indian National Science Academy The Indian National Science Academy (INSA) is a national academy in New Delhi for Indian scientists in all branches of science and technology. In August 2019, Dr. Chandrima Shaha was appointed as the president of Indian National Science Academ ...

* Life member and director of the Calcutta Statistical Association * Fellow of the

Indian Academy of Sciences The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore was founded by Indian Physicist and Nobel Laureate C. V. Raman, and was registered as a society on 24 April 1934. Inaugurated on 31 July 1934, it began with 65 founding fellows. The first general meet ...

* Japanese Society for Promotion of Sciences Fellowship, 1978 *

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (SSB) is a science award in India given annually by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for notable and outstanding research, Applied science, applied or Fundamenta ...

, 1981 * President, Statistics Section of the Indian Science Congress Association, 1991 * President,

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. It was founded in 1885, although there had been international statistical congresses since 1853. The institute has about 4,000 elected members from gov ...

, 1993 * Mahalanobis Gold Medal of Indian Science Congress Association, 1998 * Invited speaker of the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

, 1998 *

P. V. Sukhatme Pandurang Vasudeo Sukhatme (1911–1997) was an Indian statistician. He is known for his pioneering work of applying random sampling methods in agricultural statistics and in biometry, in the 1940s. He was also influential in the establishment o ...

Prize for Statistics, 2000 * Mahalanobis Memorial Lecture, State Science and Technology Congress, W. Bengal, 2003 * D.Sc. (h.c.), B.C. Roy Agricultural University, W. Bengal, India, 2006 * International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Lifetime Achievement Award, 2010 * Padma Shree (2014) by the

Government of India The Government of India (ISO: ; often abbreviated as GoI), known as the Union Government or Central Government but often simply as the Centre, is the national government of the Republic of India, a federal democracy located in South Asia, c ...

Bibliography

He has published over 50 research papers. He has also published four books, which are: * ''Invariance in Testing and Estimation'' (Lecture Notes), 1967, published by

Calcutta Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, the official name until 2001) is the Capital city, capital of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal, on the eastern ba ...

. * ''Higher Order Asymptotics'' (based on CBMS-NSF lecture), published jointly by

and

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

, 1994. * (with R.V. Ramamoorthi) ''Bayesian Nonparametrics'' (Springer 2003). * (with Mohan Delampady and Tapas Samanta) ''An Introduction to Bayesian Analysis - Theory and Methods'', Springer 2006.

References

External links

Indian Statistical Institute Statistics Department homepageDr. Ghosh's profile at Purdue UniversityDr. Ghosh's webpage at the Statistics Department of Purdue University

A biography of Dr. Ghosh written by Professor Anirban Dasgupta
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ghosh, Jayanta Kumar 1937 births 2017 deaths Scientists from Kolkata Indian statisticians Purdue University faculty University of Calcutta alumni Indian Statistical Institute alumni Recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Science Presidents of the International Statistical Institute Bengali mathematicians Recipients of the Padma Shri in science & engineering 20th-century Indian mathematicians