Raj Chandra Bose
Date
to be observed: 19Th June 2017
Raj Chandra Bose (19 June 1901 – 31 October
1987) was an Indian American mathematician and statistician best known for his work in design theory, finite geometry and the theory of error-correcting
codes in which the class of BCH codes is partly named after him.
He also invented the notions of partial geometry, strongly regular graph, and started a systematic
study of difference sets to construct symmetric block designs. He was notable for his work along with S. S. Shrikhande and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the
famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that there do not exist two mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order 4n + 2
for every
Bose was born in Hoshangabad, India; he was the first of five children. His
father was a physician and life was good until 1918 when his mother died in the influenza pandemic. His father died of a stroke the following
year. Despite difficult circumstances, Bose continued to study securing first
class in the M.A. examinations in pure mathematics at the University of
Calcutta. His research was performed under the supervision of the geometry Professor Syamadas
Mukhopadhyaya from Calcutta. Bose worked
as a lecturer at Asutosh College,
Calcutta. He published his work on the differential
geometry of convex curves.
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 on 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 Samarendra Nath Roy, who joined the ISI a
little later, Bose was the chief mathematician at the Institute.
He first worked with 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.
(GREEN HOUSE)
