Quotations

Raj Chandra Bose


View the biography of Raj Chandra Bose


There is a very famous joke about Bose's work in Giridh. Professor Mahalanobis wanted Bose to visit the paddy fields and advise him on sampling problems for the estimation of yield of paddy. Bose did not very much like the idea, and he used to spend most of the time at home working on combinatorial problems using Galois fields. The workers of the ISI used to make a joke about this. Whenever Professor Mahalanobis asked about Bose, his secretary would say that Bose is working in fields, which kept the Professor happy.
Bose memorial session, in Sankhya 54 (1992)
Once Bose was teaching a class in which Somesh Das Gupta was the only Indian and all of a sudden, Bose said, "Only Hindus can understand Design of Experiments. You see, in Design of Experiments we work with the same structure in different forms: plots viewed as points, blocks viewed as lines, a plot in a block as a point incident with a line and so on. The same thing the Hindus do, they worship the same God in different forms."
Bose memorial session, in Sankhya 54 (1992)