Anil Kumar Bhattacharya
| Anil Kumar Bhattacharya | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1 April 1915 Bhatparha Bengali: ভাটপাড়া, West Bengal, India 
|
| Died | 17 July 1996 (aged 81) |
| Citizenship |
India
|
| Alma mater | University of Calcutta |
| Known for | Bhattacharyya distance, Bhattacharyya bound |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Statistician |
| Institutions | University of Calcutta, Indian Statistical Institute |
Anil Kumar Bhattacharya (also spelled Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya, Bengali: অনিল কুমার ভট্টাচার্য) (1 April 1915 – 17 July 1996) was an Indian statistician who worked at the Indian Statistical Institute founded by P C Mahalanobis in the 1930s and early 40s. He made fundamental contributions to multivariate statistics, particularly for his measure of similarity between two multinomial distributions, known as the Bhattacharya coefficient, based on which he defined a metric, the Bhattacharya distance. This measure is widely used in comparing statistical samples in biology, physics, computer science, etc.
Distance between statistical distributions had been addressed in 1936 by Bhattacharyya's mentor, Mahalanobis, who proposed the D2 metric, now known as Mahalanobis distance. Subsequently Bhattacharya defined a cosine metric for distance between distributions, in a Calcutta Mathematical Society paper in 1943, expanding on some of the results in another paper in Sankhya in 1947. Bhattacharyya's two major research concerns were the measurement of divergence between two probability distributions and the setting of lower bounds to the variance of an unbiased estimator.
Bhattacharya was born to Bhavanath and Lilavati, some time in March–April, 1915 (in the month Chaitra Bengali: চৈত্র of the year 1321, the exact date is not known) at Bhatpara in the district of 24 Parganas of West Bengal. He passed the Matriculation Examination of Calcutta University in 1932 and I. Sc. Examination in 1934 from Hooghly Mohshin College. In 1936 he ranked first in the First Class at the B.A./B.Sc. examination from the same college and went over to Calcutta University for an M.A. in Mathematics. Here he had F. W. Levy and Raj Chandra Bose as his teachers and passed the M.A. Examination in 1938 with the first rank in the First Class.
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