A CONVERSATION WITH GUPTA,SHANTI

Shanti Gupta was born and raised in Saunasi, Mainpuri, India. He atten ded Delhi University and received B.A. Honours and M.A. degrees in mat hematics. He then took a one-year diploma course in applied statistics at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi, and his di stinguished career in statistics was launched. He came to the United S tates in 1953 and received his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics in 195 6 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill working under t he guidance of Professor Raj Chandra Bose. His thesis, ''On a decision rule for a problem in ranking means,'' began his prolific formulation of and investigation into a class of problems referred to as ''subset approach to ranking and selection.'' Shanti has held research and tea ching positions at Delhi College, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Univers ity of Alberta, Courant Institute of Mathematical Science at New York University, Stanford University and, most notably, Purdue University, where he has spent most of his professional career. At Purdue, he beca me Head of the newly created Department of Statistics in 1968 and serv ed in that capacity until 1995 when he stepped down to devote more ful ly his time and energy to teaching and research. Under his leadership, Purdue's Department of Statistics grew into one of the premier depart ments in the country. Twenty-eight Ph.D. dissertations were directed b y Shanti over this period of time. Shanti has provided exemplary servi ce to the profession. A partial list of his activities includes the fo llowing: Founding Editor of the IMS Lecture Notes-Monograph Series in Statistics and Probability (1979-1988); Chairman of the Joint Manageme nt Committee of the ASA and IMS for Current Index to Statistics (1981- 1988); Member of the NRC Advisory Committee on U.S. Army Basic Scienti fic Research (1983 -1988). He served as President of the IMS during 19 89-1990. He has also been very active with many of the statistical jou rnals, serving in both editorial and board-member capacities. Shanti h as received many honors in recognition of his valuable contributions. He is a Fellow of the ASA, AAAS and IMS and is an elected member of th e International Statistical Institute. He has held special short-term visiting positions such as Special Chair, Institute of Mathematics, Ac ademia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; and Erskine Fellow, University of Cante rbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He was one of the special invitees a t the 1990 Taipei International Symposium in Statistics and was presen ted with the key to the city by the Mayor. A recent book, Advances in Statistical Decision Theory and Applications (Birkhauser, 1997), publi shed in honor of Shanti, contains many papers in the areas where his i nfluence as a teacher and a researcher have been felt: Bayesian infere nce; decision theory; point and interval estimation; tests of hypothes es; ranking and selection; distributions theory; and industrial applic ations. The following conversation took place at the Department of Sta tistics, Purdue University, on 22 September 1997.