Narahari Umanath Prabhu (25 April 1924 – 14 October 2022) was an Indian-American mathematician, known for his contributions to operation research, in particular queueing theory.
Prabhu was the founding head of the department of statistics, Karnatak University, Dharwar in 1951.
in mathematics from University of Manchester on a thesis entitled Solution to Some Dam Problems (1957).
Prabhu was the founding editor of the Queueing Systems (journal) (1986–1994) and has edited several other journals, as well as published books on 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 [citation needed].