A conversation with V. P. Godambe

Abstract

Vidyadhar Prabhakar Godambe was born on June 1, 1926, in Pune, India. He received the M.Sc. degree in Statistics from Bombay University in 1950 and the Ph.D. from the University of London in 1958. Between periods of study, from 1951 to 1955, he was a Research Officer in the Bureau of Economics and Statistics of the Government of Bombay. Following a year as Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley (1957--1958), and a year as Senior Research Fellow at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta (1958--1959), he became Professor and Head of the Statistics Department at Science College in Nagpur. He was promoted to the position of Professor and Head of the Statistics Department in the Institute of Science, Bombay University, in 1962. In 1964, he left India for North America, becoming for one year a Research Statistician at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics in Ottawa. After subsequent Visiting Professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan, he joined the University of Waterloo Department of Statistics in 1967 and has been at Waterloo ever since.

Professor Godambe is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Member of the International Statistical Institute, and an Honorary Fellow of the International Indian Statistical Association. He is the recipient of the 1987 Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada and is an Honorary Member of that society. Upon his retirement in 1991 he was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo.

The following conversation took place in Waterloo in August 2000, mainly by correspondence. Some of the responses are taken from "Briefly about myself,'' an autobiographical piece written by Professor Godambe in 1998--2000.