Raj Chandra Bose - Academic Life

Academic Life

Bose's course changed in December 1932 when P. C. Mahalanobis, director of the new (1931) Indian Statistical Institute, offered Bose a part-time job. Mahalanobis had seen Bose’s geometrical work and wanted him to work in statistics. The day after Bose moved in, the secretary brought him all the volumes of Biometrika with a list of 50 papers to read and also Fisher's Statistical Methods for Research Workers. Mahalanobis told him, "You were saying that you do not know much statistics. You master the 50 papers … and Fisher's book. This will suffice for your statistical education for the present." With S. N. Roy, who joined the ISI a little later, Bose was the chief mathematician at the Institute.

He first worked in multivariate analysis where he collaborated with Mahalanobis and Roy. In 1938–9 Fisher visited India and talked about the design of experiments. Roy had the idea of using the theory of finite fields and finite geometry to solve problems in design. The development of a mathematical theory of design would be Bose's main preoccupation until the mid 1950s.

The ISI workers had a joke about Mahalanobis and Bose and their different priorities. The professor wanted Bose to visit the paddy fields and advise him on sampling problems for the estimation of yield of paddy. Bose did not very much like the idea, and he used to spend most of the time at home working on combinatorial problems using Galois fields. Whenever Professor Mahalanobis asked about Bose, his secretary would say that Bose is working in fields, which kept the Professor happy.

In 1935 Bose had become full-time at the Institute. In 1940 joined the University of Calcutta where C. R. Rao was in the first group of students he taught. In 1945 Bose became Head of the Department of Statistics. The university authorities told him he had to have a doctorate. So he submitted his published papers on multivariate analysis and the design of experiments and was awarded a D.Litt. in 1947.

In 1947 Bose went to the United States as a visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received offers from American universities and he was also offered positions in India. The Indian jobs involved very heavy administration, which he saw as the end of his research work and in March 1949 he joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Professor of Statistics.

In the years at Chapel Hill Bose made important discoveries on coding theory (with D.K. Ray-Chaudhuri) and constructed (with S. S. Shrikhande and E. T. Parker ) a Graeco-Latin square of size 10, a counterexample to Euler's conjecture that no Graeco-Latin square of size 4k + 2 exists. In 1971 he retired aged 70. He then accepted a chair at Colorado State University of Fort Collins from which he retired in 1980. His final doctoral student finished after this second retirement.

Bose died in Colorado, aged 86, in 1987. He is survived by two daughters. The elder, Purabi Schur, is retired from the Library of Congress and the younger, Sipra Bose Johnson, is retired as a professor of anthropology from the State University of New York at New Paltz.