Raj Chandra Bose (or Basu) (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 for no n do there exist two mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order 4n + 2.

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.

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.

So he submitted his published papers on multivariate analysis and the design of experiments and was awarded a D. Litt.

The Indian jobs involved very heavy administration, which he saw as the end of his research work and in March 1949 he joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Professor of Statistics.