The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a public research university headquartered in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

During 1913–1915, he did his Tripos in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cambridge,[7] where he came across Biometrika, a journal of statistics founded by Karl Pearson.

[8] Since 1915, he taught physics at Presidency College,[7] but his interest in statistics grew under the guidance of polymath Brajendranath Seal.

[12] In 1953,[13] ISI was relocated to a property owned by Professor Mahalanobis, named "Amrapali", in Baranagar, which is now a municipality at the northern outskirts of Kolkata.

It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a group of his colleagues including S. S. Bose, Samarendra Kumar Mitra (Head of the Computing Machines and Electronics Laboratory and designer of India's first computer), J. M. Sengupta, Raj Chandra Bose, Samarendra Nath Roy, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, Gopinath Kallianpur, D. B. Lahiri, and Anil Kumar Gain.

In due course, many of the early workers left the ISI for careers in the United States or for positions in the public and private sectors in India.

Mahalanobis over Haldane's going on a much-publicized hunger strike to protest the United States pressuring U.S. National Science Fair winners Gary Botting and Susan Brown from attending an ISI banquet to which many prominent Indian scientists had been invited.

The Sanskrit phrase भिन्नेष्वैक्यस्य दर्शणम् (Bhinneswaykyasya Darshanam), which literally means the philosophy of unity in diversity, is incorporated in the logo of the institute, and is the motto of ISI.

[23] The Bengaluru centre of ISI started with a Statistical Quality Control and Operations Research (SQC & OR) unit in 1954.

In 1966, the then Government of Karnataka granted ISI 30 acres of forest land full of eucalyptus trees, next to the upcoming campus of the Bangalore University, located on the Mysore Road on the outskirts of the city.

Concrete proposals were made to the Government of India to get grants for the development of the land already in possession of ISI, along with the construction of an academic block with a library and offices.

[29] The main training course offered by ISEC is meant for international students, preferably graduates with proficiency in English and Mathematics.

[36] In the subject-wise academic world ranking of Computer Science, the Indian Statistical Institute features in 101—150 category.

[37] The Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata is ranked 2nd in Computer Science research by mean citation rate, p-Index, h-index among all universities in India.

[39] Integration is the annual techno-cultural fest of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata usually held during the first and second weekend of January each year.

Chaos is the annual techno-cultural fest of the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore usually held during the last weekend of March each year.

Alumni of ISI – including recipients of PhD degree – are employed in government and semi–government departments, industrial establishments, research institutions, in India and other countries.

[6] Since recent past, a high percentage of ISI alumni gets absorbed into jobs in analytics, banking, finance and software industry.

[42] These units partake in technical consultancy with public and private organisations, in addition with performing research and training activities.

[44] Raj Chandra Bose, who is known for his contributions in coding theory, worked on Design of Experiments during his tenure at ISI, and was one of the three mathematicians, who disproved Euler's conjecture on orthogonal Latin squares.

[45] Among colleagues of Mahalanobis, other notable contributors were K. R. Nair in Design of experiments, Jitendra Mohan Sengupta in Sample Survey, Ajit Dasgupta in Demography and Ramkrishna Mukherjea in Quantitative Sociology.

Anil Kumar Gain is known for his contributions to the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient with his colleague Sir Ronald Fisher at the University of Cambridge.

The Indian Statistical Institute was also hosted the first two digital computers in South Asia; the HEC-2M from England in 1956, and the URAL from the Soviet Union in 1959.

[48] Other distinguished scientists including Jerzy Neyman, Walter A. Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming and Abraham Wald have visited ISI during the tenure of P. C.

The plan attempted to determine the optimal allocation of investment between productive sectors in order to maximise long-run economic growth .

It used the prevalent state of art techniques of operations research and optimisation as well as the novel applications of statistical models developed at ISI.

[55][56] The Computer and Communication Sciences division of ISI produced many eminent scientists such as Samarendra Kumar Mitra (its original founder), Dwijesh Dutta Majumdar, Sankar Kumar Pal, Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri, Nikhil R. Pal, Bhabani P. Sinha, Bhargab B. Bhattacharya, Malay K. Kundu, Sushmita Mitra, Bhabatosh Chanda, C. A. Murthy, Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay and many.

[57] The Knowledge-based Computer Systems project (KBCS), funded jointly by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DoE), Government of India and UNDP since 1986, has a nodal centre at ISI Kolkata.

[58] This unit is responsible for research in the area of image processing, pattern recognition, computer vision and artificial intelligence.

It turned out to be a unique species and was named the Barapasaurus tagorei (Dinosauria: Sauropoda), after Rabindranath Tagore and was mounted in the Geology Museum at the Kolkata Campus of the institute.