A Conversation with Kanti Mardia

Kantilal Vardichand Mardia was born on April 3, 1935, in Sirohi,\nRajasthan, India. He earned his B.Sc. degree in mathematics from Ismail Yusuf\nCollege–University of Bombay, in 1955, M.Sc. degrees in statistics and\nin pure mathematics from University of Bombay in 1957 and University of Poona\nin 1961, respectively, and Ph.D. degrees in statistics from the University of\nRajasthan and the University of Newcastle, respectively, in 1965 and 1967. For\nsignificant contributions in statistics, he was awarded a D.Sc. degree from the\nUniversity of Newcastle in 1973. He started his career as an Assistant Lecturer\nin the Institute of Science, Bombay and went to Newcastle as a Commonwealth\nScholar. After receiving the Ph.D. degree from Newcastle, he joined the\nUniversity of Hull as a lecturer in statistics in 1967, later becoming a reader\nin statistics in 1971. He was appointed a Chair Professor in Applied Statistics\nat the University of Leeds in 1973 and was the Head of the Department of\nStatistics during 1976–1993, and again from 1997 to the present.\nProfessor Mardia has made pioneering contributions in many areas of statistics\nincluding multivariate analysis, directional data analysis, shape analysis, and\nspatial statistics. He has been credited for path-breaking contributions in\ngeostatistics, imaging, machine vision, tracking, and spatio-temporal modeling,\nto name a few. He was instrumental in the founding of the Center of Medical\nImaging Research in Leeds and he holds the position of a joint director of this\ninternationally eminent center. He has pushed hard in creating exchange\nprograms between Leeds and other scholarly centers such as the University of\nGranada, Spain, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. He has written\nseveral scholarly books and edited conference proceedings and other special\nvolumes. But perhaps he is best known for his books: Multivariate Analysis\n(coauthored with John Kent and John Bibby, 1979, Academic Press), Statistics of\nDirectional Data (second edition with Peter Jupp, 1999, Wiley) and Statistical\nShape Analysis (coauthored with Ian Dryden, 1998, Wiley). The conferences and\nworkshops he has been organizing in Leeds for a number of years have had\nsignificant impacts on statistics and its interface with IT (information\ntechnology). He is dynamic and his sense of humor is unmistakable. He is a\nworld traveler. Among other places, he has visited Princeton University, the\nUniversity of Michigan, Harvard University, the University of Granada, Penn\nState and the University of Connecticut. He has given keynote addresses and\ninvited lectures in international conferences on numerous occasions. He has\nbeen on the editorial board of statistical, as well as image related, journals\nincluding the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,\nJournal of Environmental and Ecological Statistics, Journal of Statistical\nPlanning and Inference and Journal of Applied Statistics. He has been elected a\nFellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the Institute of\nMathematical Statistics, and a Fellow of the American Dermatoglyphic\nAssociation. He is also an elected member of the International Statistical\nInstitute and a Senior Member of IEEE. Professor Mardia retired on September\n30, 2000 to take a full-time post as Senior Research Professor at\nLeeds—a new position especially created for him.