Prabhu, who was from
Mangalore and
Kozhikode got a B.A. in
mathematics from
University of Madras (1946), a M.A. in statistics from
University of Bombay (1950). Prabhu was the founding head of the department of statistics,
Karnatak University, Dharwar in 1951. He obtained a M.Sc. in mathematics from
University of Manchester on a thesis entitled
Solution to Some Dam Problems (1957). Prabhu lectured at
Gauhati University (1950–1952),
Karnatak University (1952–1961),
University of Western Australia (1961–1964), before becoming
associate professor at
University of Michigan (1964–1965) and
Cornell University (1965–1994) 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, 1973),
Technion in
Haifa (1973),
University of Melbourne (1978),
University of Maryland, College Park (1979), and
Uppsala University (1984) . 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 . Prabhu died on 14 October 2022, at the age of 98. ==Awards==