Pranab Kumar Sen (7 November 1937 – 31 December 2023) was an Indian-American statistician who was a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[1][2]
Pranab Kumar Sen | |
|---|---|
| Born | 7 November 1937 |
| Died | 31 December 2023 (aged 86) |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | University of Calcutta (B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.) |
| Known for | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Statistics |
| Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Doctoral advisor | Hari Kinkar Nandi |
| Doctoral students | |
Biography
Pranab Kumar Sen was born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, India on 7 November 1937,[3] as the second of seven siblings. His father, a railway officer, died of leukemia when Sen was ten, and he was raised by his mother, the daughter of a physician.[4] He began his undergraduate studies at Presidency College, Kolkata, initially intending to study medicine but shifting to statistics when it was discovered that he was too young for medical college.[4] He received a B.S. from the University of Calcutta in 1955, an M.Sc. in 1957, and a Ph.D. in 1962;[3][2][5] his doctoral advisor was Hari Kinkar Nandi.[6][4] He taught for three years at the University of Calcutta and one more year at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the UNC faculty in 1965; although he has held visiting positions at other universities, he remained at Chapel Hill for the rest of his career.[3][2] He was the founding co-editor of two journals, Sequential Analysis and Statistics and Decisions,[4] and was joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference from 1980 to 1983.[3]
Sen died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on 31 December 2023, at the age of 86.[7]
Research and graduate advising
Sen was the author or co-author of multiple books on non-parametric statistics, the advisor of over 80 Ph.D. students, and the author of over 600 research publications.[3][8] He is known for inventing the Hodges–Lehmann estimator independently of and contemporaneously with Hodges and Lehmann[4][9] and for the Theil–Sen estimator, a form of robust regression that fits a line to two-dimensional sample points by choosing the slope of the fit line to be the median of the slopes of the lines through pairs of samples.[10][11]
Awards and honors
Sen was a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics[12] and of the American Statistical Association (ASA).[13] He became the Cary C. Boshamer Professor in 1982.[3] He was the Lukacs Distinguished Visiting Professor at Bowling Green State University in 1996–1997.[14] In 2002, he won the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award of the ASA,[15] and he was the 2010 winner of its Wilks Memorial Award "for outstanding contributions to statistical research, especially in nonparametric statistics and biostatistics; and for exceptional service in mentoring doctoral students."[16] The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 2011.[17] In 2012, the University of Calcutta awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree.[18]
In 2007, a festschrift was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday.[4][8]
Books authored
- Sen, Pranab K.; Singer, Julio M.; Pedroso de Lima, Antonio (2010). From Finite Sample to Asymptotic Methods in Statistics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-87722-0.
- Hájek, Jaroslav; Šidák, Zbyněk; Sen, Pranab K. (1999). Theory of Rank Tests (2nd ed.). San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-642350-4.
- Puri, Madan L.; Sen, Pranab K. (1985). Nonparametric Methods in General Linear Models. New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0471702276.
- Puri, Madan L.; Sen, Pranab K. (1971). Nonparametric Methods in Multivariate Analysis. New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0471702405.
References
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