death_date work_institution birth_place name field birth_date known_for article_title citizenship alma_mater
17 july 1996 university of calcutta , indian statistical institute bhatparha 20px bengali : ভাটপাড়া , west bengal , india anil kumar bhattacharya statistician 01 april 1915 bhattacharyya distance , bhattacharyya bound anil kumar bhattacharya
 20px india university of calcutta
anil kumar bhattacharya

anil kumar bhattacharya -lrb- also spelled anil kumar bhattacharyya , bengali : অনিল কুমার ভট্টাচার্য -rrb- -lrb- 1 april 1915 -- 17 july 1996 -rrb- 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 .
