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.