Awards
- Bicentennial Medal - 2019
About Madan Puri
Madan Puri received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Punjab University in India also awarded him a Doctor of Science degree. Puri is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, and the Royal Statistical Society, and he is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.
One of the premiere statisticians in the world, Puri became a member of the mathematics faculty at Indiana University Bloomington in 1968; he is currently professor emeritus at the university. His national and international reputation and visibility put the university on the map in statistics; he is considered one of the world’s most versatile, prolific researchers and influential contributors to theoretical statistics over more than four decades. Puri has co-written two advanced research monographs, edited or co-edited eleven research volumes and written more than 230 published research articles on diverse topics in statistics, probability and mathematics. Puri has given invited talks and keynote addresses at many international and national conferences and has held visiting and guest professorships at several universities, including Auckland, New Zealand; Basel and Berne, Switzerland; Gottingen, Aachen, Dortmund, Hamburg and Konstanz, Germany; Lille, France; New South Wales, La Trobe, Monash and Australian National University, Australia; Chalmers University of Technology, Goteborg, Sweden; Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Leeds, England; the University of California at Irvine; and the University of Washington, Seattle. He was also a Distinguished Visitor in the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1991. He has collaborated with 92 scholars from 22 countries on five continents.
Puri’s distinguished contributions to the field of mathematics have been awarded many prestigious honors. He twice received the Senior U.S. Scientist Award from Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and in 1994, he was invited by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences to visit Japan under its Visiting Professorship Program, to conduct cooperative research with Japanese scientists. He was ranked the fourth most prolific statistician in the world for his writings in the top statistical journals in a 1997 report by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. For his 65th birthday, 52 of his colleagues wrote articles for a book, "Research Developments in Probability and Statistics," in his honor. Another book, "Asymptotics, Nonparametrics and Time Series Analysis: A Tribute to Madan Puri," in which 43 of his colleagues around the world wrote articles in his honor, was presented to him in 1999. And the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference published a volume in his honor for which 68 of his colleagues wrote articles. In 2004, the new Indiana University title of College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Research Scholar was created and bestowed upon Puri in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the world of nonparametric statistics. In 2014, Puri received one of the American Statistical Association’s most prestigious honors: the Samuel S. Wilks Award. With this recognition, he became the sixth person in the world to have received the association’s two most distinguished awards (he was honored with the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award in 2008). In 2019, Puri was awarded Indiana University’s Bicentennial Medal, in recognition of his incredible contributions to the field of mathematics.