13 Facts About Debabrata Basu

Debabrata Basu was an Indian statistician who made fundamental contributions to the foundations of statistics.

In statistical theory, Debabrata Basu's theorem established the independence of a complete sufficient statistic and an ancillary statistic.

Debabrata Basu was associated with the Indian Statistical Institute in India, and Florida State University in the United States.

Debabrata Basu was born in Dacca, Bengal, unpartitioned India, now Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Debabrata Basu's father, N M Basu, was a mathematician specialising in number theory.

Debabrata Basu took a course in statistics as part of the under-graduate honours programme in Mathematics but his ambition was to become a pure mathematician.

Debabrata Basu married Kalyani Ray in 1952 and subsequently had two children, Monimala Basu and Shantanu Basu.

In 1953, after submitting his thesis to the University of Calcutta, Debabrata Basu went as a Fulbright scholar to the University of California, Berkeley.

Debabrata Basu thus had a good understanding of the decision-theoretic approach to statistics of Neyman, Pearson and Wald.

Debabrata Basu is described as having returned from Berkeley to India as a "complete Neyman Pearsonian" by JK Ghosh.

The final conversion to Bayesianism came in January 1968, when Debabrata Basu was invited to speak at a Bayesian Session in the Statistics Section of the Indian Science Congress.

Debabrata Basu taught at the Indian Statistical Institute and various universities around the world.

Debabrata Basu moved to the United States and taught statistics at Florida State University from 1975 to 1990 when he was made an emeritus professor; he has supervised six PhD students.