Narendra Karmarkar (born 1957) is an Indian mathematician. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT Bombay in 1978.

In 1984, while working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he discovered what is now known as Karmarkar's algorithm .

The Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the prestigious Paris Kanellakis Award for his work. The award citation reads:

For his theoretical work in devising an Interior Point method for linear programming that provably runs in polynomial time, and for his implementation work suggesting that Interior Point methods could be effective for linear programming in practice as well as theory. Together, these contributions inspired a renaissance in the theory and practice of linear programming, leading to orders of magnitude improvement in the effectiveness of widely-used commercial optimization codes.