V. P. Godambe

Vidyadhar Prabhakar Godambe (1 June 1926 – 9 June 2016) was an Indian statistician. He was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo. Godambe was known for formulating and developing a theory of estimating equations.

Early life and education Godambe was born on 1 June 1926, in Pune, India, as the second oldest of four children. He was frail and sickly growing up, so he attended the local school from age five to 10. Godambe later attended Nutan Marathi Vidyalaya in Pune and Fergusson College for his Bachelor of Science in mathematics. Godambe began his career at the University of Waterloo in July 1967 as a visiting professor in Statistics and Actuarial Sciences but was granted tenure as Professor in July 1969. A few years later, in 1971, Godambe and Mary Thompson read a paper to the Royal Statistical Society entitled ‘Bayes, fiducial, and frequency aspects of statistical inference in survey sampling.

Awards and honours In 1987, Godambe was honoured with the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) Gold Medal and was later named an honorary member. In 1991, he was appointed a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo. In 2002, Godambe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.