About The Department

The Department of Statistics of the erstwhile Presidency College, now University, is one of the oldest departments in the country and perhaps in Asia. The undergraduate course of the department started way back in 1944, under the guidance of the great Professor P.C.Mahalanobis, also hailed as one of the greatest statisticians in the world. This was at a time when Statistics as a distinct course was quite unknown in many American universities as well. Since then the department has produced illustrious scholars, academicians and statisticians who have achieved enormous fame in India and abroad. It is a proud privilege to mention that Professor Jayanta Kumar Ghosh (Alumni 1954) is a recipient of Padma Shree Award (2014) of the Government of India.

Among others, mention should be made of the illustrious trio of statistical education in India – Prof. A.M.Gun, Prof. M.K.Gupta and Prof. B.Dasgupta. Before Presidency College achieved the status of University in 2010, the department catered to only undergraduate teaching in Statistics under the auspices of the University of Calcutta and soon the department was successful enough to have a special entity in the University with its outstanding performance over the years. From 2011, the department has been conducting both under-graduate and post-graduate semester-based programmes in Statistics under Presidency University. Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) has been introduced in the undergraduate syllabus from the academic year 2018-2019.

A good number of students of the department have gone abroad for furtherance of their academic career and others are doing jobs in the areas of Data Science, Analytics and Business Intelligence, Banking and Finance, Actuarial and Insurance, Bio-Statistics etc.