Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya

Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya (1 April 1915 – 17 July 1996) was an Indian statistician who worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in the 1930s and early 40s. He made fundamental contributions to multivariate statistics, particularly for his measure of similarity between two multinomial distributions, known as the Bhattacharyya coefficient, based on which he defined a metric, the Bhattacharyya distance. This measure is widely used in comparing statistical samples in biology, genetics, physics, computer science, etc.