Raj Chandra Bose (19 June 1901 – 31 October 1987) was an Indian American mathematician and statistician best known for his work in design theory, finite geometry and the theory of error-correcting codes in which the class of BCH codes is partly named after him. He also invented the notions of partial geometry, association scheme, and strongly regular graph and started a systematic study of difference sets to construct symmetric block designs. He was notable for his work along with S. S. Shrikhande and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that there do not exist two mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order 4n + 2 for every n. Early life Bose was born in Hoshangabad, India; he was the first of five children. His father was a physician and life was good until 1918 when his mother died in the influenza pandemic. His father died of a stroke the following year. Despite difficult circumstances, Bose continued to study securing first class in both the Masters examinations in Pure and Applied mathematics in 1925 and 1927 respectively at the Rajabazar Science College campus of University of Calcutta. His research was performed under the supervision of the geometry Professor Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya from Calcutta. Bose worked as a lecturer at Asutosh College, Calcutta. He published his work on the differential geometry of convex curves. Academic life Bose's course changed in December 1932 when P. C. Mahalanobis, director of the new (1931) Indian Statistical Institute, offered Bose a part-time job. Mahalanobis had seen Bose's geometrical work and wanted him to work on statistics. The day after Bose moved in, the secretary brought him all the volumes of Biometrika with a list of 50 papers to read and also Ronald Fisher's Statistical Methods for Research Workers. Mahalanobis told him, "You were saying that you do not know much statistics. You master the 50 papers ... and Fisher's book. This will suffice for your statistical education for the present." With Samarendra Nath Roy, who joined the ISI a little later, Bose was the chief mathematician at the Institute. He first worked with multivariate analysis where he collaborated with Mahalanobis and Roy. In 1938–9 Fisher visited India and talked about the design of experiments. Roy had the idea of using the theory of finite fields and finite geometry to solve problems in design. The development of a