[1] This measure is widely used in comparing statistical samples in biology, genetics,[2] physics, computer science, etc.
Bhattacharyya was born to Bhavanath and Lilavati, sometime in March–April 1915 (in the month Chaitra Bengali: চৈত্র of the year 1321, the exact date is not known)[3] at Bhatpara in the district of 24 Parganas of West Bengal.
In 1939, at Levy's suggestion, Bhattacharyya met P. C. Mahalanobis together with Bose and joined the Indian Statistical Institute as an honorary worker.
[4][5] In 1941, he was made a part-time lecturer in the newly formed Statistics Department of Calcutta University, headed by Mahalanobis.
He occupied the post of Senior Professor until his retirement in March 1974, but in 1967 he stepped down from the leadership, apparently piqued by certain moves of the West Bengal Government's Education Department.
[3] Almost since his retirement from Government service, he had been associated with the Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Residential College as a guest teacher.
Subsequently, Bhattacharyya defined a cosine metric for the distance between multinomial distributions, this work despite being submitted for publication in 1941, appeared almost five years later in Sankhya.
[7][4] Progress toward more general results, which defines the distance metric between two probability distributions which are absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure, has been done by Bhattacharyya, which has come in 1942, at Proceedings of the Indian Science Congress.