Vasant Shankar Huzurbazar obtained his PhD (1949) from the University of Cambridge, UK. His areas of specialization were probability, statistics and mathematical logic. He was Senior Professor and Head, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Poona.(1953-76); Fulbright Visiting Professor, Iowa state University, USA (1962-64); Visiting Professor, University of Manitoba, Canada (1976-79) and University of Denver, USA (1979-91).

Academic and Research Achievements: Huzurbazar made outstanding contributions to: maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian inference, invariants of probability distributions, orthogonal parameters, sufficient statistics in nonregular cases, characterization of some well-known distributions by combinations of properties of location, scale and sufficiency, and approach to certainty of an inductive inference. He published a book, Sufficient Statistics (Marcell Dekkar, 1976). Huzurbazar investigated the relationship between the concepts of sufficient statistic and the exponential (Koopman-Pitman-Darmois) family on the one hand and the concepts of invariant prior distributions on the other. These were named as Huzurbazar’s invariants. Besides the above theory of invariants, Huzurbazar simultaneously worked on properties of the maximum likelihood method of estimation. He could show that the probability that the likelihood function attains its maximum at a consistent solution of the likelihood equation approaches 1 as the sample size tends to and that a consistent solution of the likelihood equation is unique. This work filled a significant gap in the theory of likelihood as developed by Fisher and the followers of the frequentist or objective school of Statistics. This work was appreciated by Wald and other leading mathematical statisticians of the time. It is now included in basic statistical theory and taught in post-graduate courses on Mathematical Statistics all over the world.

Awards and Honours: Huzurbazar received the Adams Prize of University of Cambridge (1961). He was the President, Statistics Section of Indian Science Congress (1966-67) and was honoured with Padma Bhushan (1974) and UGC National Lecturership (1975-76). Huzurbazar was a member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, American Statistica