Indian Statistical Institute
Encyclopedia
Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a public research institute and university in Kolkata
's northern outskirt of Baranagar
, India
founded by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
in 1931. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions focused on Statistics
, and its early reputation led it to being adopted as a model for the first US institute of statistics set up at the Research Triangle, North Carolina
by Gertrude Mary Cox
.
Its main activities are research and teaching of Statistics
, Mathematics
, Computer Science
and other natural and social sciences. Originally affiliated with the University of Calcutta
, the institute was declared an Institute of National Importance
in 1959.
The main campus and headquarters is located in Baranagar
, in suburban Kolkata. The campuses at Kolkata, Delhi
and Bangalore
focus on teaching, and the institute has offices in seven other locations like Hyderabad, India engaging in consultancy in statistical process control
and operations research
. The Director is Professor Bimal Kumar Roy
and the Dean of Studies is Professor Bhabani Prasad Sinha.
ISI's main areas of expertise are the fields of statistics
, mathematics
, computer science
, quantitative economics
, operations research
and information science
and is one of the few research oriented Indian schools at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
was set up by Mahalanobis in the Physics Department of the college in 1920s. Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics and the group grew in the Statistical Laboratory. A meeting was called on 17 December 1931 with Pramatha Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen (Khaira Professor of Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. This meeting led to the establishment of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), which was formally registered on 28 April 1932 as a non-profit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860. Later, the Institute was registered under the West Bengal Societies Registration Act XXVI of 1961 amended in 1964. The ISI was relocated to a property owned by Professor Mahalanobis, named "Amrapali", in Baranagar
, North Kolkata.
In 1931, Mahalanobis was the only person working for ISI and he managed it with an annual expenditure of Rs. 250. It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a group of his colleagues including S. S. Bose, J. M. Sengupta, R. C. Bose, S. N. Roy
, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, G. Kallianpur and D. B. Lahiri. The institute gained major assistance through Pitamber Pant, who was a secretary to the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
. Pant was trained in statistics at the Institute and took a keen interest in the institute.
In 1933, the journal Sankhya was founded along the lines of Karl Pearson
's Biometrika
. It is currently published four times annually.
The Institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the early workers left the ISI for careers in the USA and with the government of India. By the 1940s,
J. B. S. Haldane
joined the ISI as a Research Professor from August 1957 and stayed on until February 1961. He resigned from ISI due to frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis's administrative policies. He was also very concerned with the frequent travels and absence of the director and wrote The journeyings of our Director define a novel random vector. Haldane helped the ISI grow in biometrics.
In 1959 the Institute was declared as an Institute of national importance and a deemed university
. Until then, it was associated with the University of Calcutta
. ISI started centres in New Delhi and Bangalore and units in Chennai and Hyderabad. In 2008, ISI Chennai was upgraded from unit to centre.
ISI Kolkata has a campus consisting of six addresses at 201 through 206 Barrackpore Trunk Road, Baranagar
. These include a house, which was an erstwhile office of the National Sample Survey Organisation
(NSSO) of India, and prior to that, a movie studio in the 1920s and 1930s.
, S. R. S. Varadhan, R. C. Bose, D. Basu, K. R. Parthasarathy, Jayanta Kumar Ghosh, G. Jogesh Babu, T. Parthasarathy, Thriyambakam Krishnan, G. N. Kallianpur, Rajeev Karandikar, Ravindra Khattree
, alash Kumar], J. S. Rao, Kesar Singh, Ranajit Chakraborty
, Probal Chaudhuri, Arup Bose, Sundaram Thangavelu, Subhashis Ghosal, Nilanjan Chatterjee, Sudipto Banerjee, Sourav Chatterjee
, Jean Drèze
and Sucharit Sarkar
. N. Vijayaditya, former Director General, National Informatics Centre
and Controller of Certifying Authorities, Government of India
, took a Masters degree in Statistics from Indian Statistical Institute.
Even being new, the computer and communication sciences department of Indian Statistical Institute affiliates many eminent scientists like Sankar K. Pal, Malay K. Kundu, Bidyut B. Chaudhuri, Nikhil R. Pal, Bhabani P. Sinha, Bhargab B. Bhattacharya, C. A. Murthy and S. Bandyopadhyay.
The institute has led research in anthropology and palaeontology. A species of dinosaur, the Isisaurus
, was named after the institute. It was originally named Baropa-sauras Tagori in honor of the poet Rabindranath Tagore
.
The Kolkata campus offers bachelors level degree in Statistics (B. Stat) and masters degree in Statistics
, Computer Science
, Quality Reliability and Operations Research and
Quantitative Economics. Major divisions and units are:
The Kolkata campus houses the International Statistical Education Centre (ISEC), which opened in 1950. This Centre provides training in statistics to sponsored students mainly from the Middle East, South and South East Asia, the Far East and the Commonwealth Countries of Africa. The Centre also offers various short-term courses in statistics and related subjects.
The Central Library of ISI is located at Kolkata with branches at the other facilities. The library has over 200,000 volumes of books and journals with a special emphasis on the field of statistics and related studies. The main branch also has a collection of official reports, reprints, maps, and microfilms. The library receives over a thousand new technical and scientific journals every year. The Library has databases on CD-ROM and is working on further digitization of the collection. The library has a separate collection of works on the topics of mathematics and statistics called the Eastern Regional Centre of NBHM collection, funded by grants from the National Board for Higher Mathematics
.
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
's northern outskirt of Baranagar
Baranagar
Baranagar or Barahanagar, meaning the big and town or land of the pig , is a town in the northern outskirts of Kolkata. It is a municipality in North 24 Parganas district in the state of West Bengal, India. A railway station of the same name is on the Dankuni line off the Sealdah north section...
, India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
founded by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis FRS was an Indian scientist and applied statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India...
in 1931. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions focused on Statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
, and its early reputation led it to being adopted as a model for the first US institute of statistics set up at the Research Triangle, North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
by Gertrude Mary Cox
Gertrude Mary Cox
Gertrude Mary Cox was an influential American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later appointed director of both the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina and the Statistics Research...
.
Its main activities are research and teaching of Statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
, Mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
and other natural and social sciences. Originally affiliated with the University of Calcutta
University of Calcutta
The University of Calcutta is a public university located in the city of Kolkata , India, founded on 24 January 1857...
, the institute was declared an Institute of National Importance
Institute of National Importance
An Institute of National Importance, in India is defined as one which serves as a pivotal player in developing highly skilled personnel within the specified region of the country/state. Institutes on the list are usually supported by the Government of India...
in 1959.
The main campus and headquarters is located in Baranagar
Baranagar
Baranagar or Barahanagar, meaning the big and town or land of the pig , is a town in the northern outskirts of Kolkata. It is a municipality in North 24 Parganas district in the state of West Bengal, India. A railway station of the same name is on the Dankuni line off the Sealdah north section...
, in suburban Kolkata. The campuses at Kolkata, Delhi
Delhi
Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...
and Bangalore
Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
focus on teaching, and the institute has offices in seven other locations like Hyderabad, India engaging in consultancy in statistical process control
Statistical process control
Statistical process control is the application of statistical methods to the monitoring and control of a process to ensure that it operates at its full potential to produce conforming product. Under SPC, a process behaves predictably to produce as much conforming product as possible with the least...
and operations research
Operations research
Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...
. The Director is Professor Bimal Kumar Roy
Bimal Kumar Roy
Bimal Kumar Roy is the current Director of the Indian Statistical Institute. He is a renowned cryptologist from the Cryptology Research Group of the Applied Statistics Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He received a Ph.D. in Combinatorics and Optimization in 1982 from the University of...
and the Dean of Studies is Professor Bhabani Prasad Sinha.
ISI's main areas of expertise are the fields of statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
, mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, quantitative economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
, operations research
Operations research
Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...
and information science
Information science
-Introduction:Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information...
and is one of the few research oriented Indian schools at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
History
The Statistical Laboratory in the Presidency College, KolkataPresidency College, Kolkata
Presidency University, Kolkata, formerly Hindu College and Presidency College, is a unitary, state aided university, located in Kolkata, West Bengal. and one of the premier institutes of learning of liberal arts and sciences in India. In 2002 it was ranked number one by the weekly news magazine...
was set up by Mahalanobis in the Physics Department of the college in 1920s. Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics and the group grew in the Statistical Laboratory. A meeting was called on 17 December 1931 with Pramatha Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen (Khaira Professor of Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. This meeting led to the establishment of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), which was formally registered on 28 April 1932 as a non-profit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860. Later, the Institute was registered under the West Bengal Societies Registration Act XXVI of 1961 amended in 1964. The ISI was relocated to a property owned by Professor Mahalanobis, named "Amrapali", in Baranagar
Baranagar
Baranagar or Barahanagar, meaning the big and town or land of the pig , is a town in the northern outskirts of Kolkata. It is a municipality in North 24 Parganas district in the state of West Bengal, India. A railway station of the same name is on the Dankuni line off the Sealdah north section...
, North Kolkata.
In 1931, Mahalanobis was the only person working for ISI and he managed it with an annual expenditure of Rs. 250. It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a group of his colleagues including S. S. Bose, J. M. Sengupta, R. C. Bose, S. N. Roy
S. N. Roy
Samarendra Nath Roy or S. N. Roy was an Indian-born American mathematician and an applied statistician. He was the first of two children of Kali Nath Roy and Suniti Bala Roy. His father, Kali Nath Roy was a freedom fighter and the Chief Editor of the newspaper TRIBUNE.Prof. Roy had a brilliant...
, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, G. Kallianpur and D. B. Lahiri. The institute gained major assistance through Pitamber Pant, who was a secretary to the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru , often referred to with the epithet of Panditji, was an Indian statesman who became the first Prime Minister of independent India and became noted for his “neutralist” policies in foreign affairs. He was also one of the principal leaders of India’s independence movement in the...
. Pant was trained in statistics at the Institute and took a keen interest in the institute.
In 1933, the journal Sankhya was founded along the lines of Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....
's Biometrika
Biometrika
- External links :* . The Internet Archive. 2011....
. It is currently published four times annually.
The Institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the early workers left the ISI for careers in the USA and with the government of India. By the 1940s,
- the Indian Statistical Institute was internationally known and was taken as a model when the first Institute of Statistics was set up in the United States by Gertrude Cox - perhaps the only time an institute in a developing country was used as a model in a developed country.
J. B. S. Haldane
J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS , known as Jack , was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. A staunch Marxist, he was critical of Britain's role in the Suez Crisis, and chose to leave Oxford and moved to India and became an Indian citizen...
joined the ISI as a Research Professor from August 1957 and stayed on until February 1961. He resigned from ISI due to frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis's administrative policies. He was also very concerned with the frequent travels and absence of the director and wrote The journeyings of our Director define a novel random vector. Haldane helped the ISI grow in biometrics.
In 1959 the Institute was declared as an Institute of national importance and a deemed university
Deemed University
Deemed university is a status of autonomy granted to high performing institutes and departments of various universities in India. This status of ‘Deemed-to-be-University’, is granted by Department of Higher Education, Union Human Resource Development Ministry, on the advice of the University Grants...
. Until then, it was associated with the University of Calcutta
University of Calcutta
The University of Calcutta is a public university located in the city of Kolkata , India, founded on 24 January 1857...
. ISI started centres in New Delhi and Bangalore and units in Chennai and Hyderabad. In 2008, ISI Chennai was upgraded from unit to centre.
ISI Kolkata has a campus consisting of six addresses at 201 through 206 Barrackpore Trunk Road, Baranagar
Baranagar
Baranagar or Barahanagar, meaning the big and town or land of the pig , is a town in the northern outskirts of Kolkata. It is a municipality in North 24 Parganas district in the state of West Bengal, India. A railway station of the same name is on the Dankuni line off the Sealdah north section...
. These include a house, which was an erstwhile office of the National Sample Survey Organisation
National Sample Survey Organisation
The National Sample Survey Organisation or NSSO, now National Sample Survey Office is an organization in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of the Government of India...
(NSSO) of India, and prior to that, a movie studio in the 1920s and 1930s.
Objectives
The major objectives of the Indian Statistical Institute are:- The study and teaching of statistics, statistical theory, and statistical methods and their use in practical applications and research. The Institute has a special focus on problems of national development and social welfare.
- Study in the fields of natural and social sciences, with an emphasis on the development of statistics in these fields.
- To devise methods and perform collection of information for projects and planning in the fields of management and production.
Programs of study
Traditionally, ISI offers fewer programs (and admits fewer students) than most other degree granting academic institutions. The following are the degree programs currently offered by ISI.- Bachelor of Statistics (Honours)
- Bachelor of Mathematics (Honours)
- Master of Statistics
- Master of Mathematics
- Master of Science in Quantitative Economics
- Master of Science in Library and Information Science
- Master of Technology in Computer Science
- Master of Technology in Quality, Reliability and Operations Research
- Doctor of Philosophy
Achievements
Among alumni of ISI, there are many who excelled in the field of economics, statistics, mathematics or probability. Notable ones among them include C. R. RaoC. R. Rao
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao FRS known as C R Rao is an Indian statistician. He is currently professor emeritus at Penn State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao has been honored by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US...
, S. R. S. Varadhan, R. C. Bose, D. Basu, K. R. Parthasarathy, Jayanta Kumar Ghosh, G. Jogesh Babu, T. Parthasarathy, Thriyambakam Krishnan, G. N. Kallianpur, Rajeev Karandikar, Ravindra Khattree
Ravindra Khattree
Ravindra Khattree is an Indian born statistician and professor of statistics at Oakland University. His contribution to the Fountain-Khattree-Peddada Theorem in Pitman measure of closeness is one of the important results of his work. Khattree is the coauthor of two books and has coedited two...
, alash Kumar], J. S. Rao, Kesar Singh, Ranajit Chakraborty
Ranajit Chakraborty
Professor Ranajit Chakraborty is a human geneticist and currently the Robert A. Kehoe Professor and Director of Center for Genome Information at College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati. He was born in West Bengal, India....
, Probal Chaudhuri, Arup Bose, Sundaram Thangavelu, Subhashis Ghosal, Nilanjan Chatterjee, Sudipto Banerjee, Sourav Chatterjee
Sourav chatterjee
Sourav Chatterjee is a mathematician, specializing in mathematical statistics and probability theory. Chatterjee is credited with work on Stein's method on Spin Glasses and also the Universality of Lindeberg principle. For these achievements, he was awarded a Sloan Fellowship in 2007 from the...
, Jean Drèze
Jean Drèze
Jean Drèze is a development economist who has been influential in Indian economic policymaking. He is a naturalized Indian of Belgian origin. His work in India include issues like hunger, famine, gender inequality, child health and education, and the NREGA...
and Sucharit Sarkar
Sucharit Sarkar
Sucharit Sarkar is currently Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University.-Education:He received his B. Math degree from Indian Statistical Institute in 2005. He represented India at IMO in 2001, 2002 and secured Gold medal and silver medal respectively. He got the third rank in IIT-JEE 2002...
. N. Vijayaditya, former Director General, National Informatics Centre
National Informatics Centre
The National Informatics Centre ' is the main science & technology organisation of India's Union Government in informatics services and information-and-communication- technology applications...
and Controller of Certifying Authorities, Government of India
Government of India
The Government of India, officially known as the Union Government, and also known as the Central Government, was established by the Constitution of India, and is the governing authority of the union of 28 states and seven union territories, collectively called the Republic of India...
, took a Masters degree in Statistics from Indian Statistical Institute.
Even being new, the computer and communication sciences department of Indian Statistical Institute affiliates many eminent scientists like Sankar K. Pal, Malay K. Kundu, Bidyut B. Chaudhuri, Nikhil R. Pal, Bhabani P. Sinha, Bhargab B. Bhattacharya, C. A. Murthy and S. Bandyopadhyay.
The institute has led research in anthropology and palaeontology. A species of dinosaur, the Isisaurus
Isisaurus
Isisaurus is a genus of dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Period. Isisaurus was a sauropod , which lived in what is now India....
, was named after the institute. It was originally named Baropa-sauras Tagori in honor of the poet Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
.
The Kolkata campus
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
, Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, Quality Reliability and Operations Research and
Quantitative Economics. Major divisions and units are:
- Statistical Mathematics Unit (SMU)
- Physics and Applied Mathematics Unit (PAMU)
- Advanced Computation and MicroElectronics Unit (ACMU)
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit (CVPRU)
- Machine Intelligence Unit (MIU)
- Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit (ECSU)
- Applied Statistics Unit (ASU)
The Kolkata campus houses the International Statistical Education Centre (ISEC), which opened in 1950. This Centre provides training in statistics to sponsored students mainly from the Middle East, South and South East Asia, the Far East and the Commonwealth Countries of Africa. The Centre also offers various short-term courses in statistics and related subjects.
The Central Library of ISI is located at Kolkata with branches at the other facilities. The library has over 200,000 volumes of books and journals with a special emphasis on the field of statistics and related studies. The main branch also has a collection of official reports, reprints, maps, and microfilms. The library receives over a thousand new technical and scientific journals every year. The Library has databases on CD-ROM and is working on further digitization of the collection. The library has a separate collection of works on the topics of mathematics and statistics called the Eastern Regional Centre of NBHM collection, funded by grants from the National Board for Higher Mathematics
National Board for Higher Mathematics
The National Board for Higher Mathematics , founded in 1983 by the Indian Government, is a board in India intended to foster the development of higher mathematics, help in the establishment and development of mathematics centres, and give financial assistance to research projects and to doctoral...
.
Campus links
- Kolkata (location: 22.648810°N 88.377058°E)
- Delhi (location: 28.539436°N 77.185494°E)
- Bangalore (location: 12.932468°N 77.503196°E)
- Chennai
- Faculty list by location and category