Samarendra Nath Roy

Samarendra Nath Roy (11 December 1906 – 23 July 1964) was an Indian-born American mathematician and an applied statistician.

Early life Roy was the first of three children of Kali Nath Roy and Suniti Bala Roy. His father, was a freedom fighter and the Chief Editor of the newspaper The Tribune, then publishing from Lahore. Roy and The Tribune published seven allegedly seditious articles from April 3, 1919 through April 11, 1919, leading up to the April 13th massacre of the Indians at the hands of the British in the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre. For this "offence" Kali Nath Roy was sentenced to imprisonment of two years along with a fine of one thousand rupees.

Roy secured first division in the Matriculation Examination in 1923 from the Khulna District School. He was well known for his pioneering contribution to multivariate statistical analysis, mainly that of the Jacobians of complicated transformations for various exact distributions, rectangular coordinates and the Bartlett decomposition. His dissertation included the Post master's work at the Indian Statistical Institute where he worked under Mahalanobis.

It was Bose who first went to the United States as a visiting professor at Columbia University and then joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1947. Roy followed suit by later joining him at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the spring of 1950, after initially travelling to the United States to take up a Visiting Professorship of Statistics at Columbia University in New York in the spring of 1949. In between this Roy returned to India and became Head of the Department of Statistics at the University of Calcutta during the academic year 1949–50. To commemorate his Birth Centenary an International Conference on "Multivariate Statistical Methods in the 21st Century: The Legacy of Prof. S.N. Roy" was held at Kolkata, India during 28–29 December 2006. The Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference published a special issue for celebrating the Centennial of Birth of S. N. Roy. "Contributions to the statistical analysis of categorical data". Gnanadesikan, Ramanathan (1957). "Contributions to multivariate analysis including univariate and multivariate variance components analysis and factor analysis". Potthoff, Richard F. (1958). "Multi-dimensional incomplete block designs". Diadmond, Earl L. (1958). "Asymptotic power and independence of certain classes of tests on categorical data". Bargman, Rolf (1958). "A study of independence and dependence in multivariate normal analysis". Cobb, Whitfield (1959). "Studies in univariate and multivariate variance components analysis connected with sampling from a finite population". Bhapkar, Vasant P. (1959). "Contributions to the statistical analysis of experiments with one or more responses". Sathe, Yashawande S. (1962). "Studies in certain types of nonparametric inference". Das Gupta, Somesh (1963). "Some problems in classification". Mudholkar, Govind S. (1963). "Some contributions to the theory of univariate and multivariate statistical analysis". Sources:

Recognition Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow of the International Statistical Institute in 1951 President of the Statistical Section of the Indian Science Congress in 1948 Fellow of The National Institute of Sciences (FNASc), India (now known as the Indian National Science Academy) in 1946