N. U. Prabhu

Narahari Umanath Prabhu (born April 25, 1924 in Kozhikode) is an Indian-American mathematician, known for his contributions to operation research, in particular queueing theory.

Career

Prabhu a Goud Saraswat Brahmin from Mangalore and Kozhikode got his B.A. in mathematics from University of Madras (1946), an M.A. in statistics from University of Bombay (1950). Prabhu did the pioneering work of establishing the department of statistics, Karnatak University, Dharwar in 1951. He obtained an M.Sc. in mathematics from University of Manchester on a thesis entitled Solution to Some Dam Problems (1957).

Prabhu lectured at Gauhati University (1950–52), Karnatak University (1952–61), University of Western Australia (1961–64), before becoming associate professor at University of Michigan (1964–65) and Cornell University (1965–94) where he became professor (1967) and emeritus (1994). Prabhu also had longer research stays at Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta (1961), University of Wisconsin–Madison (1970, 73), Technion in Haifa (1973), University of Melbourne (1978), University of Maryland, College Park (1979), and Uppsala University (1984).

He was the founding editor of the Queueing Systems (journal) (1986–94) and has edited several other journals, as well as published the books Foundations of Queueing Theory (Springer Verlag, 1997) and Stochastic storage processes (Springer, 1998).

The South Asia Program at Cornell created the Rabindranath Tagore Endowment in Modern Indian Literature, made possible through a gift by Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife.

Awards

• INFORMS (Applied Probability) Award of Honor (1997)
• Honorary fellow of the Indian statistical association (1998)

References

• N. U. Prabhu at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• On Google scholar