 Academically known as K. R. Rao, he is credited with the co-invention of discrete cosine transform (DCT), along with Nasir Ahmed and T. Natarajan due to their landmark publication, N. Ahmed, T. Natarajan, and K. R. Rao, "Discrete Cosine Transform", "IEEE Transactions on Computers", 90–93, Jan 1974.Rao received a B.S.in Electrical Engineering (E. E.) from the College of Engineering, Guindy, affiliated with the University of Madras, India in 1952.