Pranab Kumar Sen (7 November 1937 – 31 December 2023) was an Indian-Americanstatistician who was a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.^[1][2]

Pranab Kumar Sen was born inCalcutta,Bengal Presidency,India on 7 November 1937,^[3] as the second of seven siblings. His father, a railway officer, died of leukemia when Sen was ten, and he was raised by his mother, the daughter of aphysician.^[4] He began his undergraduate studies atPresidency College, Kolkata, initially intending to study medicine but shifting to statistics when it was discovered that he was too young for medical college.^[4] He received a B.S. from theUniversity of Calcutta in 1955, an M.Sc. in 1957, and a Ph.D. in 1962;^[3][2][5] hisdoctoral advisor was Hari Kinkar Nandi.^[6][4] He taught for three years at the University of Calcutta and one more year at theUniversity of California, Berkeley before joining the UNC faculty in 1965; although he has held visiting positions at other universities, he remained at Chapel Hill for the rest of his career.^[3][2] He was the founding co-editor of two journals,Sequential Analysis andStatistics and Decisions,^[4] and was joint editor-in-chief of theJournal of Statistical Planning and Inference from 1980 to 1983.^[3]

Sen died inChapel Hill, North Carolina on 31 December 2023, at the age of 86.^[7]

Sen was the author or co-author of multiple books onnon-parametric statistics, the advisor of over 80 Ph.D. students, and the author of over 600 research publications.^[3][8] He is known for inventing theHodges–Lehmann estimator independently of and contemporaneously with Hodges and Lehmann^[4][9] and for theTheil–Sen estimator, a form ofrobust regression that fits a line to two-dimensional sample points by choosing the slope of the fit line to be the median of the slopes of the lines through pairs of samples.^[10][11]

Sen was a fellow of theInstitute of Mathematical Statistics^[12] and of theAmerican Statistical Association (ASA).^[13] He became the Cary C. Boshamer Professor in 1982.^[3] He was theLukacs Distinguished Visiting Professor atBowling Green State University in 1996–1997.^[14] In 2002, he won theGottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award of the ASA,^[15] and he was the 2010 winner of itsWilks Memorial Award "for outstanding contributions to statistical research, especially in nonparametric statistics and biostatistics; and for exceptional service in mentoring doctoral students."^[16] The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour ofPadma Shri in 2011.^[17] In 2012, theUniversity of Calcutta awarded him anhonorary Doctor of Science degree.^[18]

In 2007, afestschrift was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday.^[4][8]

• Sen, Pranab K.; Singer, Julio M.; Pedroso de Lima, Antonio (2010).From Finite Sample to Asymptotic Methods in Statistics. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 978-0-521-87722-0.
• Hájek, Jaroslav;Šidák, Zbyněk; Sen, Pranab K. (1999).Theory of Rank Tests (2nd ed.). San Diego: Academic Press.ISBN 0-12-642350-4.
• Puri, Madan L.; Sen, Pranab K. (1985).Nonparametric Methods in General Linear Models. New York: Wiley.ISBN 978-0471702276.
• Puri, Madan L.; Sen, Pranab K. (1971).Nonparametric Methods in Multivariate Analysis. New York: Wiley.ISBN 978-0471702405.

• 1937 births
• 2023 deaths
• Indian statisticians
• Presidency University, Kolkata alumni
• University of Calcutta alumni
• Academic staff of the University of Calcutta
• University of California, Berkeley faculty
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty
• Recipients of the Padma Shri in civil service
• Fellows of the American Statistical Association
• 20th-century Indian mathematicians
• Scientists from Kolkata
• American mathematical statisticians

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