who was the founder (in 1931) of the Indian Statistical Institute. Mahalanobis studied physics at Calcutta U and Cambridge U. In the library of King's College, Cambridge, Mahalanobis was asked by a fellow student to express his opinion about an article in Biometrika It was this encounter that stimulated his subsequent research in Statistics. Practical problems led to theoretical advances in many areas of Statistics—it was an anthropometric problem that led to his construction of the eponymous Mahalanobis distance, D2. As statistical adviser to the Indian government, Mahalanobis established, in 1950, the first national survey of India's population. He was elected FRS in 1945.
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