Balasubrahmanyan Ramachandran obtained his BA (Hons) in Mathematics (1952) from the University of Madras and underwent the 3-year Advanced Statisticians Training Course (1956-59) of the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata. He received his PhD in Mathematics (1961) from the Catholic University of America, on the order and type of entire characteristic functions, working with Eugene Lukacs as his supervisor. Thereafter, he mostly served the Indian Statistical Institute (Chennai: 1964-66, Kolkata: 1966-69 and New Delhi: 1975-92 till his retirement). He spent the years 1969-75 and 1986-87 visiting the Catholic University of America, Indiana and Mc Gill universities. He continued his research after retirement as INSA Senior Scientist (1993-98). .

Academic and Research Achievements: Dr Ramachandran's research interests mainly relate to analytical probability theory regarding, specifically, characteristic functions (Fourier-Stieltjes Transforms of probability distributions) and characterization problems in probability theory and mathematical statistics. He has more than 40 research papers to his credit. Much of his research work is summed up in his monographs, Advanced Theory of Characteristic Functions (Statistical Publishing Society, Kolkata, 1967) and Functional Equations in Probability Theory (Academic Press, Boston, 1991). He also translated the Russian original text of Characterization Problems in Mathematical Statistics by A M Kagan, Ju V Linnik and C Radhakrishna Rao, which was published by John Wiley (1973). He is currently engaged in putting together a monograph on selected topics in analytical probability theory..

Other Contributions: Dr Ramachandran served as co-Editor, and later Editor, of the journal Sankhya: the Indian Journal of Statistics, in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was Head of the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi Centre between 1982 and 1986.