Editorial Article: Remembering D. Basu’s Legacy in Statistics

Abstract

This special issue of Sankhya Series A is dedicated to the memory of Professor Debabrata Basu, popularly known as D. Basu, on the occasion of his birth centenary. We pay tribute to one of the finest statisticians, a great thinker, and a world-renowned teacher. D. Basu is internationally known for his immensely important contributions to understanding the foundations of statistical inference. His work was marked by profound simplicity and unparalleled ability to make statistical theory instructive and enjoyable.D. Basu was born on July 5, 1924, in undivided India in the city of Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh. In late 1946, he graduated from Dhaka University with an M.A. in Pure Mathematics. After going through the tragic political turmoil following the partition of India, his family moved to Kolkata as refugees. He briefly returned to Dhaka after being offered a faculty position at Dhaka University. However, due to growing political unrest, he was forced to return to Kolkata almost immediately. He joined the Indian Statistical Institute in September 1950 as a research fellow under the supervision of C. R. Rao. At that time, Abraham Wald was about to visit the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). Basu started reading Wald's works before his visit. Being a trained mathematician, Basu was fascinated by Wald's decision-theoretic formulation of statistics. He found Wald's definition of the best procedure as admissible and minimax was unlike anything he had seen in the statistical literature then. While reading one of Wald's results about minimaxity, Basu found a flaw in the argument. The argument breaks down if the maximum risk is infinite. When he met Wald, Basu excitedly mentioned that to Wald, who famously replied, "Of course, they are all wrong," jokingly; by that, Wald meant that appropriate conditions are needed to ensure their validity. 0123456789().: V,-vol