Indian Statistical Institute
Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics and the group grew in the Statistical Laboratory located in his room at the Presidency College, Calcutta. A meeting was called on the 17 December 1931 with Pramatha Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen (Khaira Professor of Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. The meeting led to the establishment of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), and formally registered on 28 April 1932 as a non-profit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860.
The Institute was initially in the Physics Department of the Presidency College and the expenditure in the first year was Rs. 238. 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, D. B. Lahiri and C. R. Rao. The institute also 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.
The Institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the early workers left the ISI for careers in the United States and with the government of India. Mahalanobis invited J. B. S. Haldane to join him at the ISI and Haldane joined as a Research Professor from August 1957 and stayed on until February 1961. He resigned from the ISI due to frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis' 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 however helped the ISI grow in biometrics.
In 1959 the Institute was declared as an Institute of national importance and a deemed university.
Read more about this topic: Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
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