Ramanathan Gnanadesikan (2 November 1932 – 6 July 2015) was an Indian statistician, known for his work in multivariate data analysis and leadership in the field.

He received his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina and headed research groups in statistics at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore.

As a 12-year-old boy, he sympathized with the Indian Independence movement and spent two weeks at the ashram founded by Mahatma Gandhi.

[citation needed] At the age of 20, he came to the United States to work on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[5] A second thrust was evaluating whether the results of such analyses were dependent on small changes in the input variables, leading to an unrealistic sensitivity to errors of measurement.

He worked closely with Martin Wilk, with whom he wrote a number of papers on graphical methods for data analysis.