Like many other fields of science and humanities, statistics has also fallen victim to the inorganic growth of technological education, as a result of which the number of students opting for this serious subject has nosedived.
Half the jobs in the IT sector, especially in emerging areas such as big data analytics and machine learning, are in statistics. There are, however, few statisticians to apply for these jobs, and IT employers have come to terms with this hard fact. Renowned statistician and emeritus professor at McGill University, Canada, A.M. Mathai said motivating students to take statistics as a serious career option was the only way out.
Mr. Mathai is in Tirupati for the first annual conference of the newly formed Andhra Pradesh Statistics Association (APSA) and gave an exclusive interview to The Hindu on Sunday on the academic issues plaguing the field.
The statistical ecosystem used to be vast, but it shrunk over time, thanks to undue emphasis on engineering and technology, a trend that started nearly three decades ago and had had a cascading effect on several subjects, including statistics, Mr. Mathai said.
To curb the fall, he mentored 13 Ph.D. scholars over seven years, starting 2006-07. Only two, however, went for advanced research, said Mr. Mathai, who is turning 88 next month.
His appealed to young statisticians to develop self-discipline, cultivate work culture and spend quality time on serious research. He also advised them to read books published by international publishers and research journals of repute. “Downloading a few papers and writing something parallel or making minor extensions or computations is not proper research,” said Mr. Mathai, who is also the author of the 950-page book titled Multivariate statistical analysis in the real and complex domains.
APSA president P. Rajasekhara Reddy, who is also the former head of Operations Research Society of India (ORSI), was present.
