U. Narayan Bhat

Brief Biography

U. Narayan Bhat is an Indian-born statistician and mathematician known for his contributions to queueing theory and reliability theory. Bhat received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Madras, one of the oldest and premier universities in India. He taught high school mathematics for two years before resuming his studies at Karnatak University in Dharwad. After receiving a master’s degree, Bhat lectured at the university’s Statistics Department for three years. He eventually went on to receive a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Western Australia.

Bhat held positions at Michigan State University and Case Western Reserve University before settling at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By 1971 he was made a full professor in the Statistical Science and Operations Research Departments, serving as chair of each from 1987-1989 and 1975-1979, respectively. He was the school’s Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for twelve years, beginning in 1992. In addition to his academic positions, Bhat has consulted with a number of communications firms as an operations analyst including the Defense Communications Engineering Center and Advanced Business Communications, Inc.

Bhat’s research in queueing theory has served as the foundation of three books on the subject. In 1968 he published a topical study on the M/G/1 queue (a model where arrivals are Markovian, service times have a general distribution, and there is a single server) and the G/M/1 queue (a representation of the queue length in a system where interarrival times have a general distribution and service times for each job have an exponential distribution). The so-called “busy period” can be computed using a duality between the two models. Bhat’s other queueing theory books are broader in scope, such as the 2008 textbook, Introduction to Queueing Theory.

In addition to queueing theory, Bhat has made contributions to reliability and statistics and applied probability. In 1972, he published Elements of Applied Stochastic Processes, releasing later editions with his former PhD students and now Stephen F. Austin State University professor, Gregory K. Miller. Bhat has also authored a number of articles on probability models for computing and communication systems.  

An active member if the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and its successor, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), Bhat has held leadership positions with the organizations’ professional sections and associated societies. He chaired the Applied Probability Society (APS) from 1979 to 1980 and served as president of Omega Rho, the international honor society for operations research and management science. Bhat has also served as an associate editor of many OR journals including, Operations Research (1970-1975), Management Science (1969-1974), and Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications (1985-2000). In 2004, he was elected into the third class of INFORMS Fellows.

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Wikipedia Entry for U. Narayan Bhat