Vinayak Madaheo JOSHI, 1914-1996

It is rare that a senior government official will obtain late in his career a PhD and DSc in a field as highly technical as mathematical statistics. It is perhaps even rarer that such a person will then pursue a distinguished second career as an academic, publishing extensively and making many outstanding contributions to the foundations of his discipline. This, however, has been the case with Professor V.M. Joshi, whose 70th birthday was marked by a Festschrift and series of Symposia on Statistics held 27-31 May 1985 at the University of Western Ontario.

Born on 10 July 1914 in Poona, India, Professor Joshi graduated with a BSc from the University of Bombay in 1934, standing first in the first class. He then went to Cambridge, where he obtained a BA in 1937, passing Parts II and III of the Mathematics Tripos with a first class and distinction. In 1936 he sat for the competitive examinations of the Indian Civil Service. Upon completion of one year’s probationary training at Cambridge, he started his administrative career in the Bombay Province in September 1937. During this phase of his career, he became a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries (1954). By 1968 Professor Joshi had risen to the post of Secretary of the Finance Department in the Bombay State Government. He retired in 1972 but remained in a consultative capacity over the next two years in the setting up of an Institute of Quantitative Sciences. In 1974 he came to North America, spending his first year in a visiting position at Berkeley. He has been at the University of Western Ontario since 1977.

Professor Joshi married in 1941. He and his wife, Manik, have three children: two daughters, Padmaja and Jayashree, and a son, Prakash.

Professor Joshi’s research career in statistics began in 1964 when he wrote his first statistics paper with Professor Godambe (Annals, 1965) on the Horvitz-Thompson estimator. He continued this work, publishing two more papers in the Annals in 1965. He submitted this work and some additional material to the Bombay University as a thesis and obtained a PhD from there in 1966. In 1972 Bombay University honoured him with a DSc. His work has also been given international recognition: he was elected a member of the ISI in 1971 and a fellow of the IMS in 1972.

Professor Joshi’s research began, and has continued in, the area of sampling from finite populations. His first work was in the area of sampling from finite populations. His first work in this area, that published jointly with Professor V.P. Godambe, was developed further in a long series of papers appearing in the Annals on foundational topics in finite sampling. Later his research interests expanded to include the study of other topics in the foundations of statistical inference. Also, beginning in 1975, Professor Joshi made contributions to standard p-functions, an area of probability replete with difficult problems.

In recent papers he has shown that if samples are taken independently from different finite populations, the sample means are jointly admissible for the population means. Thus, for finite populations the James-Stein effect does not occur. The result, of great significance to the foundations of finite sampling, is proved for a very general loss function which includes almost any loss function considered in practice.

Throughout his career, Professor Joshi’s work has been characterized by an ability to solve technically difficult problems and to bring fresh insights to long-standing foundational conjectures. He continues to be an active researcher.

Ian B. MacNeill, 1985