Raj Chandra Bose

Raj Chandra Bose, who lived from 1901 to 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 was born in Hoshangabad into a Bengali family, studied at the University of Calcutta and worked at the Indian Statistical Institute from 1932, collaborating with P. C. Mahalanobis and S. N. Roy. He introduced partial geometries, association schemes and strongly regular graphs and began the systematic study of difference sets used to build symmetric block designs. With S. S. Shrikhande and E. T. Parker he disproved Euler's 1782 conjecture on orthogonal Latin squares of order 4n plus 2. He joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as professor of statistics in 1949.