Ragu Raj Bahadur was born on April 30, 1924 in Delhi, India. After completing his
undergraduate education in the University of Delhi, he secured his Ph.D. in statistics from
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1950, under the guidance of Herbert
Robbins. In the 1950s he served as a Professor at ISI, Calcutta, and from 1961 onwards, he
was a Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago, where he retired in 1992 and
passed away as a Professor Emeritus on July 7, 1997, at the young age of 73.
Bahadur was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics, the International Statistical Institute, the Indian National Sciences
Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. He was an excellent lecturer and the 1974
Wald Lecturer of the IMS and served as the President of the IMS in 1974-75.
Bahadur made several foundational and seminal contributions to statistics. His papers are
extremely well written and transparent. His paper on `On Fisher's bound for asymptotic
variances' provides an elegant proof of the fact that in the absence of regularity conditions
the Fisher information bound for the asymptotic variance of CAN estimate of a parameter
may be violated on a set of parameter values having Lebesgue measure zero. In
connection with his work on Bahadur efficiency he developed in depth large deviation
analysis of the log-likelihood ratio statistic. One of his most cited paper is the paper bearing
the title `A note on quantiles in large samples' in Ann. Math. Statist. 37, 577--580, 1966,
where he obtained an almost sure first order approximation for the sample quantile. This
work was later refined by Jayant Ghosh and Jack Kiefer. It is now known as the Bahadur-
Ghosh-Kiefer representation. Bahadur's work with T.W. Anderson on solving binary
classification problems with applications to statistical classification and engineering is
known as the Anderson-Bahadur algorithm.
Steve Stigler, the Ernest De Witt Burton Distinguished Service Professor of Statistics at the
University of Chicago, says that ``"Raj was one of the architects of the modern theory of
mathematical statistics. His work, which was characterized by a singular depth and
elegance, changed the way statisticians think about statistical information at a fundamental
level. People from all over the world made pilgrimages to see him."
To honor his legacy, the IISA has instituted Bahadur Lecture Series since 2017. At the
forthcoming IISA 2022 meeting in Bengaluru, Professor Soumendra Lahiri will be the
Bahadur Lecturer. Professor Lahiri made fundamental and pioneering contributions to
bootstrap methodology and statistical inference at large, making him a very appropriate
person to deliver this lecture. Past Bahadur Lecturers were Arup Bose (Mumbai, 2019),
Alexander Belloni (2018, Gainesville) and J. Sethuraman (2017, Hyderabad).
