Ram Gnanadesikan, one of the foremost industrial statisticians of the last century, passed away on 6 July 2015 on Martha’s Vineyard, MA, where he had a much-beloved summer home.
After completing his Ph.D. in 1957 at the University of North Carolina, Ram spent two years at Procter & Gamble before joining Bell Labs in 1959, where he rose to be the head of the Statistics and Data Analysis Research Department from 1968 through 1983. At that time, Bell Labs was the research arm of the nationwide Bell System in the USA. After its monumental breakup in 1984, Ram joined Bellcore as division manager of Information Sciences Research. In 1986 he was promoted to assistant vice president of what became known as the Information Sciences and Technologies Research Laboratory. In 1991 he was appointed professor of statistics at Rutgers University, where he remained until his retirement in 1998.
Ram was the consummate applied statistician with a great flare for research to improve methodologies available to practitioners. He loved to tackle real data problems wherever they arose, e.g. in areas such as air pollution, speaker recognition, aging of semiconductor devices, and risk modeling of companies. Many of these problems needed nonstandard statistical approaches which stimulated much of his research.
Perhaps the best example of this can be seen in his classic paper with Martin Wilk on probability methods for data analysis in Biometrika, 1968, 1-17. It had a large impact on statistical practice and led to follow up papers on graphical methods for analysis of variance. His book on the analysis of multivariate observations (1997, Wiley, 2nd ed.) reflects many of his own contributions to that field, again with strong emphasis on graphics and what works in practice.
For much more on Ram’s statistical research and his perspectives on the discipline, see the interview with him in Statistical Science, 2001, 295-309.
Ram also contributed widely to our statistics infrastructure. He served as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1998-1999) and the International Association for Statistical Computing (1981-1983), which he helped to found. He was a member of the board of directors of the American Statistical Association (1983-1985), chaired its committees on fellows (1989) and publications (1981-1982), and was president of the Cincinnati chapter (1958-1959). He was elected to the council of the International Statistical Institute for six years (1977-1983) and served as vice president of ISI for two terms (1997-2001). He also headed the ISI Working Group on industrial statistics and led various efforts that eventually resulted in what is now the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics. For that reason, ISI President Nair has referred to Ram as the 'founding father' of ISBIS, now ten years old.
Ram’s humanitarian instincts, inspired perhaps by his exposure to Gandhi as a teenager, touched many. In 1989 the senate in his home state of New Jersey honored him for his contributions to greater understanding between the people of India and America. Ram is survived by his statistician wife Mrudulla; son Anand, his wife Amalia,
and their daughter Gita; and son Mukund, his wife Dominik, and their daughter, Mara.
Jon Kettenring
July 2015
