Mahalanobis and statistics As the Statistics Day is being celebrated in honour of the birth anniversary of (late) Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, I thought a brief sketch of his life will be appropriate at this juncture. Born on June 29 1893 in a well-to-do progressive Brahmo family, he passed away on June 28, 1972.
He graduated in physics from Presidency College, Kolkata and went on to study in Cambridge in 1913 and in 1915 finished his Tripos in Natural Science with a first class. His first encounter with Statistics was also a chance-event, when his tutor Macaulay drew his attention to some bound volumes of Biometrika.