Jon NK Rao, Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa ("Canada's Capital University"), was born 80 years ago today (16 May 1937) in then-British India.
He received a BA degree from Andhra University in 1954 (at age 17) and an MA in Statistics from the University of Bombay in 1956. Two years later he entered Iowa State University. He was given ISU's Snedecor Award as its outstanding PhD student before receiving a PhD in Statistics in 1961.
Upon graduation, Dr. Rao took a position at ISU. A few years later he moved to Texas A&M and was promoted to full professor soon thereafter.
Dr. Rao moved to Canada in 1969 and went on to advise 10 PhD students from 1977-2007.
Jon NK Rao is one of the world's leading specialists in survey-sampling theory and methodology, with scores of published papers on such, focusing on variance estimation, ratio estimation, pps sampling, analysis of survey data, imputation, foundations of sampling, biostatistics applications, and a great deal on small-area estimation (including a book on such).
Dr. Rao became a Fellow of the ASA in 1964, a Fellow of the AAAS in 1965, a Fellow of the IMS in 1972, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute the following year.
Another way to consider J.N.K. Rao's vast contributions to sampling is to look at William Cochran's classic book Sampling Techniques. Not only are the titles of 17 of Dr. Rao's papers listed in the References but in the Author Index near the end of the book it lists 25 pages in which his work is cited, with the first one being a reference to a footnote on Page 45, which states the following: "Henceforth in this book the surname Rao will refer to J.N.K. Rao unless otherwise noted." (Also, consider that the most recent edition of Cochran's book was published in 1977, and Dr. Rao has contributed much more since then.)
Furthermore, if we look at the current (2009) edition of Sharon Lohr's modern classic book Sampling: Design and Analysis, her References lists 25 titles of papers for J.N.K. Rao, with all but three after 1977.
One of the three references is to a 1962 paper by Rao, Cochran, and H.O. Hartley, which led to the eponymous Rao-Hartley-Cochran (RHC) method for selecting primary sampling units with unequal probabilities. (Hartley was Rao's dissertation adviser at ISU.)
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David Bernklau
(David Bee on Internet)
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