Mahalanobis, Prasanta Chandra (1893–1972)

Abstract

Mahalanobis was born in Calcutta of a well-to-do Bengali middle-class family with a reformed outlook on Hindu religion. He was educated first at Presidency College, Calcutta, and then at Cambridge, where he graduated with a First in Natural Sciences from King’s College in 1915. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946 and received many other scientific honours. While Mahalanobis served as Professor of Physics at Presidency College for nearly three decades, his scientific work consisted chiefly of developing statistical theory and techniques that had application to a wide range of subjects, beginning with meteorology and anthropology and ending in economics.