Mardia is not a city in Nigeria, but rather refers to Kantilal Vardichand "Kanti" Mardia, an Indian-British statistician. He was born in Sirohi, Rajasthan, India, into a Jain family and currently resides and works in Leeds.
Mardia specializes in several fields of statistics, including directional statistics, multivariate analysis, geostatistics, statistical bioinformatics, and statistical shape analysis. He is specifically recognized for his work on the statistical measures of shape and his series of tests regarding multivariate normality based measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis.