Debabrata Basu

Debabrata Basu (1924 to 2001) was an Indian statistician who made fundamental contributions to the foundations of statistics. Born in Dacca in undivided Bengal, he studied mathematics at Dacca University, worked briefly as an actuary in Calcutta, and in 1950 joined the Indian Statistical Institute as a research scholar under C. R. Rao. As a Fulbright scholar at Berkeley he worked among Jerzy Neyman's circle, and Basu's theorem, which establishes the independence of a complete sufficient statistic and an ancillary statistic, dates from that time. He later became a committed Bayesian and wrote provocative examples, including the circus elephant problem, that exposed difficulties in likelihood-based and frequentist inference and shaped the theory of survey sampling. He taught at the Indian Statistical Institute and, from 1975 to 1990, at Florida State University.