Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis :
                                                  

Born	29 June 1893 Calcutta, Bengal, British India
Died	28 June 1972 (aged 78) Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Residence	India, United Kingdom, United States
Nationality	India
Fields	Mathematics, Statistics
Institutions	University of Cambridge Indian Statistical Institute
Alma mater	University of Calcutta University of Cambridge
Known for	Mahalanobis distance
Notable awards	Weldon Memorial Prize (1944) Padma Vibhushan (1968)
Indian Statistical Institute: Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics and the group grew in the Statistical Laboratory located in his room at the Presidency College, Calcutta. A meeting was called on the 17 December 1931 with Pramatha Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen (Khaira Professor of Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. The meeting led to the establishment of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), and formally registered on 28 April 1932 as a non-profit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860.[1] The Institute was initially in the Physics Department of the Presidency College and the expenditure in the first year was Rs. 238. It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a group of his colleagues including S. S. Bose, J. M. Sengupta, R. C. Bose, S. N. Roy, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, Gopinath Kallianpur, D. B. Lahiri and C. R. Rao. The institute also gained major assistance through Pitamber Pant, who was a secretary to the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Pant was trained in statistics at the Institute and took a keen interest in the institute.[1] In 1933, the journal Sankhya was founded along the lines of Karl Pearson's Biometrika.[1] The institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the early workers left the ISI for careers in the United States and with the government of India. Mahalanobis invited J. B. S. Haldane to join him at the ISI and Haldane joined as a Research Professor from August 1957 and stayed on until February 1961. He resigned from the ISI due to frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis's policies. He was also very concerned with the frequent travels and absence of the director and wrote The journeyings of our Director define a novel random vector. Haldane however helped the ISI grow in biometrics.[3] In 1959, the institute was declared as an institute of national importance and a deemed university.[1] Mahalanobis five year plan: The model was created as an analytical framework for India’s Second Five Year Plan in 1955 by appointment of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, as India felt there was a need to introduce a formal plan model after the First Five Year Plan (1951-1956). The First Five Year Plan stressed investment for capital accumulation in the spirit of the one-sector Harrod–Domar model. It argued that production required capital and that capital can be accumulated through investment; the faster one accumulates, the higher the growth rate will be. The most fundamental criticisms came from Mahalanobis, who himself was working with a variant of it in 1951 and 1952. The criticisms were mostly around the model’s inability to cope with the real constraints of the economy; it’s ignoring of the fundamental choice problems of planning over time; and the lack of connection between the model and the actual selection of projects for governmental expenditure. Subsequently Mahalanobis introduced his celebrated two-sector model, which he later expanded into a four-sector version.