Kantilal Vardichand Mardia was born on April 3, 1935, in Sirohi,
Rajasthan, India. He earned his B.Sc. degree in mathematics from Ismail Yusuf
College–University of Bombay, in 1955, M.Sc. degrees in statistics and
in pure mathematics from University of Bombay in 1957 and University of Poona
in 1961, respectively, and Ph.D. degrees in statistics from the University of
Rajasthan and the University of Newcastle, respectively, in 1965 and 1967. For
significant contributions in statistics, he was awarded a D.Sc. degree from the
University of Newcastle in 1973. He started his career as an Assistant Lecturer
in the Institute of Science, Bombay and went to Newcastle as a Commonwealth
Scholar. After receiving the Ph.D. degree from Newcastle, he joined the
University of Hull as a lecturer in statistics in 1967, later becoming a reader
in statistics in 1971. He was appointed a Chair Professor in Applied Statistics
at the University of Leeds in 1973 and was the Head of the Department of
Statistics during 1976–1993, and again from 1997 to the present.
Professor Mardia has made pioneering contributions in many areas of statistics
including multivariate analysis, directional data analysis, shape analysis, and
spatial statistics. He has been credited for path-breaking contributions in
geostatistics, imaging, machine vision, tracking, and spatio-temporal modeling,
to name a few. He was instrumental in the founding of the Center of Medical
Imaging Research in Leeds and he holds the position of a joint director of this
internationally eminent center. He has pushed hard in creating exchange
programs between Leeds and other scholarly centers such as the University of
Granada, Spain, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. He has written
several scholarly books and edited conference proceedings and other special
volumes. But perhaps he is best known for his books: Multivariate Analysis
(coauthored with John Kent and John Bibby, 1979, Academic Press), Statistics of
Directional Data (second edition with Peter Jupp, 1999, Wiley) and Statistical
Shape Analysis (coauthored with Ian Dryden, 1998, Wiley). The conferences and
workshops he has been organizing in Leeds for a number of years have had
significant impacts on statistics and its interface with IT (information
technology). He is dynamic and his sense of humor is unmistakable. He is a
world traveler. Among other places, he has visited Princeton University, the
University of Michigan, Harvard University, the University of Granada, Penn
State and the University of Connecticut. He has given keynote addresses and
invited lectures in international conferences on numerous occasions. He has
been on the editorial board of statistical, as well as image related, journals
including the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,
Journal of Environmental and Ecological Statistics, Journal of Statistical
Planning and Inference and Journal of Applied Statistics. He has been elected a
Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics, and a Fellow of the American Dermatoglyphic
Association. He is also an elected member of the International Statistical
Institute and a Senior Member of IEEE. Professor Mardia retired on September
30, 2000 to take a full-time post as Senior Research Professor at
Leeds—a new position especially created for him.