Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya

Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya (1915 to 1996) was an Indian statistician who worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in the 1930s and early 1940s and later headed the statistics department at Presidency College in Calcutta. He made fundamental contributions to multivariate statistics. His best known result is a measure of similarity between two multinomial distributions, now called the Bhattacharyya coefficient, from which he defined the metric known as the Bhattacharyya distance; the measure is used to compare statistical samples in biology, genetics, physics and computer science. He also characterised bivariate normal distributions through normal conditional distributions, set information lower bounds for the variance of estimators that extend the Cramer-Rao bound, and studied unbiased statistics of minimum variance. He studied at Calcutta University under F. W. Levi and Raj Chandra Bose, and later taught students including C. R. Rao.