Debabrata Basu

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Debabrata Basu (Bengali: দেবব্রত বসু)(1924 - March 24, 2001) Indian statistician, who specialised in the foundations of statistics. Basu’s theorem on the independence of a complete sufficient statistic and an ancillary statistic was given in a 1955 paper.

Debabrata Basu was born in Dacca, Bengal, now Dhaka, Bangladesh. His father, N. M. Basu, was a mathematician. Young Basu studied mathematics at Dacca University. He took a course in statistics as part of the under-graduate honours programme in Mathematics but his ambition was to become a pure mathematician. After getting his Master's degree from Dacca University, Basu taught there from 1947 to 1948.

Following the partition of India in 1947 Basu made trips to India and he moved to Calcutta permanently in 1950, joining the Indian Statistical Institute as a research scholar with C.R. Rao. Abraham Wald visited India in 1950 and he made a strong impression on Basu. After submitting his thesis in 1953, Basu went as a Fullbright scholar to the University of California, Berkeley. There Jerzy Neyman had built up a strong department and Basu came back a convinced Neyman-Personian.

When R.A. Fisher visited ISI in 1955 he made a vigorous attack on Neyman’s approach to statistical inference and emphasised the need for appropriate conditioning in statistical inference. Basu saw Fisher as trying to find a middle position between Berkeley frequentism and Bayes. Basu experimented with the likelihood principle but from around 1968 he settled for being a Bayesian. Basu’s speciality was the critical essay and the production of striking counter-examples.

After teaching at the Indian Statistical Institute Dr. Basu moved to the United States and taught statistics at Florida State University from 1975 to 1990 when he was made an emeritus professor.