Pranab_K._Sen
Pranab K. Sen
American statistician (1937–2023)
Pranab Kumar Sen (7 November 1937 – 31 December 2023) was an Indian-American statistician who was a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[1][2]
Pranab Kumar Sen | |
---|---|
Born | (1937-11-07)7 November 1937 |
Died | 31 December 2023(2023-12-31) (aged 86) |
Citizenship | American |
Alma mater | University of Calcutta (B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.) |
Known for | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Statistics |
Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Doctoral advisor | Hari Kinkar Nandi |
Doctoral students | |
Pranab Kumar Sen was born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, India on 7 November 1937,[3] as the second of seven siblings. His father, a railway officer, died of leukemia when Sen was ten, and he was raised by his mother, the daughter of a physician.[4] He began his undergraduate studies at Presidency College, Kolkata, initially intending to study medicine but shifting to statistics when it was discovered that he was too young for medical college.[4] He received a B.S. from the University of Calcutta in 1955, an M.Sc. in 1957, and a Ph.D. in 1962;[3][2][5] his doctoral advisor was Hari Kinkar Nandi.[6][4] He taught for three years at the University of Calcutta and one more year at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the UNC faculty in 1965; although he has held visiting positions at other universities, he has remained at Chapel Hill for the rest of his career.[3][2] He was the founding co-editor of two journals, Sequential Analysis and Statistics and Decisions,[4] and was joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference from 1980 to 1983.[3]
Sen died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on 31 December 2023, at the age of 86.[7]
Sen was the author or co-author of multiple books on non-parametric statistics, the advisor of over 80 Ph.D. students, and the author of over 600 research publications.[3][8] He is known for inventing the Hodges–Lehmann estimator independently of and contemporaneously with Hodges and Lehmann[4][9] and for the Theil–Sen estimator, a form of robust regression that fits a line to two-dimensional sample points by choosing the slope of the fit line to be the median of the slopes of the lines through pairs of samples.[10][11]
Sen was a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics[12] and of the American Statistical Association.[13] He became the Cary C. Boshamer Professor in 1982.[3] He was the Lukacs Distinguished Visiting Professor at Bowling Green State University in 1996–1997.[14] In 2002, he won the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award of the American Statistical Association,[15] and he was the 2010 winner of the Wilks Memorial Award of the ASA "for outstanding contributions to statistical research, especially in nonparametric statistics and biostatistics; and for exceptional service in mentoring doctoral students."[16] The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 2011.[17] In 2012, the University of Calcutta awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree.[18]
In 2007, a festschrift was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday.[4][8]
- "Pranab K. Sen Obituary | UNC Statistics & Operations Research". stor.unc.edu. Retrieved 1 February 2024.
- Faculty profile, UNC Chapel Hill, retrieved 3 July 2011.
- Curriculum vitae Archived 20 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 3 July 2011.
- "H. K. Nandi's Contributions to Statistics–An Appreciation". Calcutta Statistical Association Bulletin. 40 (1–4): 1–22. 1990. doi:10.1177/0008068319900503. ISSN 0008-0683.
- "Pranab K. Sen Obituary". UNC. 20 January 2024. Retrieved 5 February 2024.
- Lehmann, Erich L. (2006). Nonparametrics: Statistical methods based on ranks (Reprinting of 1988 revision of 1975 Holden-Day ed.). New York: Springer. pp. 176 and 200–201. ISBN 978-0-387-35212-1. MR 0395032.
- Rousseeuw, Peter J.; Leroy, Annick M. (2003), Robust Regression and Outlier Detection, Wiley Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics, vol. 516, Wiley, p. 67, ISBN 978-0-471-48855-2.
- Wilcox, Rand R. (2001), "Theil–Sen estimator", Fundamentals of Modern Statistical Methods: Substantially Improving Power and Accuracy, Springer-Verlag, pp. 207–210, ISBN 978-0-387-95157-7.
- IMS Fellows Archived 2 March 2014 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 3 July 2011.
- ASA Fellows, retrieved 3 July 2011.
- Bowling Green State University: Eugene Lukacs Professors Archived 12 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 3 July 2011.
- Gottfried E. Noether Awards, retrieved 3 July 2011.
- "UNC Gillings community mourns Professor Emeritus Pranab Sen". UNC Gillings School of Public Health. 5 January 2024. Retrieved 12 April 2024.
- "Padma Awards" (PDF). Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. 2015. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- "Annual Convocation". University of Calcutta. Archived from the original on 28 May 2012.