Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan is a distinguished university professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is an internationally recognized expert on statistical distribution theory, and a book-powerhouse with over 24 authored books, four authored handbooks, and 30 edited books under his name. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Communications in Statistics published by Taylor & Francis. He was also the Editor-in-Chief for the revised version of Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences published by John Wiley & Sons. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2016, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece. In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
book "Ancient Inhabitants of Jebel Moya" published by the Cambridge Press under the joint authorship of Rao and two anthropologists. On the basis of work done at CU during the two year period, 1946-1948, Rao earned a Ph.D. degree and a few years later Sc.D. degree of CU and the rare honor of life fellowship of Kings College, Cambridge.
He retired from ISI in 1980 at the mandatory age of 60 after working for 40 years during which period he developed ISI as an international center for statistical education and research. He also took an active part in establishing state statistical bureaus to collect local statistics and transmitting them to Central Statistical Organization in New Delhi. Rao played a pivitol role in launching undergraduate and postgraduate courses at ISI. He is the author of 475 research publications and several breakthrough papers contributing to statistical theory and methodology for applications to problems in all areas of human endeavor. There are a number of classical statistical terms named after him, the most popular of which are Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao-Blackwellization, Rao's Orthogonal arrays used in quality control, Rao's score test, Rao's Quadratic Entropy used in ecological work, Rao's metric and distance which are incorporated in most statistical books.
He is the author of 10 books, of which two important books are, Linear Statistical Inference which is translated into German, Russian, Czec, Polish and Japanese languages, and Statistics and Truth which is translated into, French, German, Japanese, Mainland Chinese, Taiwan Chinese, Turkish and Korean languages.
He directed the research work of 50 students for the Ph.D. degrees who in turn produced 500 Ph.D.'s. Rao received 38 hon. Doctorate degree from universities in 19 countries spanning 6 continents. He received the highest awards in statistics in USA, UK and India: National Medal of Science awarded by the president of USA, Indian National Medal of Science awarded by the Prime Minister of India and the Guy Medal in Gold awarded by the Royal Statistical Society, UK. Rao was a recipient of the first batch of Bhatnagar awards in 1959 for mathematical sciences and and numerous medals in India and abroad from Science Academies. He is a Fellow of Royal Society (FRS), UK, and member of National Academy of Sciences, USA, Lithuania and Europe. In his honor a research Institute named as CRRAO ADVANCED INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS, STATISTICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE was established in the campus of Hyderabad University.
