Paul Green (engineer)

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For other persons of the same name, see Paul Green.

Paul Eliot Green, Jr. (born January 1924 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) was an American electrical engineer, famous for his research in spread spectrum and radar technology. He was the son of playwright Paul Green.

Green majored in physics from University of North Carolina, while serving at Naval ROTC from which he later retired as a lieutenant commander. His masters studies in electrical engineering at the same university (1948) focused on cryptographic research, and were followed by Ph.D. from M.I.T. (1953) on a thesis on spread spectrum, supervised by Wilbur Davenport, Robert Fano and Jerome Wiesner. This involved creating the Rake receiver (with Robert Price) and supervision of its deployment in a first-ever spread-spectrum system, the Lincoln F9C (1950).

Following his studies, Green and Price (at Lincoln Laboratories), attempting to bounce radar waves off the planet Venus (1958). With Gordon Pettengill, the two of them worked out a theory of range-Doppler mapping that was used on the Magellan probe mapping of Venus' surface twenty years later. He also designed the LASA (Large Aperture Seismic Array) for earthquake prediction, first deployed in Montana and Norway (at NORSAR) in 1963.

In 1969, Green became head of IBM Research, communications dept., involved in the Systems Network Architecture, in particular the Advanced peer-to-peer networking protocol. Since 1988 he headed the optical communications (focusing on wavelength division multiplexing) research group that was acquired by Tellabs company where he worked 1997-2000.

Green is the author of Fiber Optic Networks (1992) and published extensively during his career. He is an IEEE Fellow (1962), received the Aerospace pioneer award (1980), was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (1982) and received the Simon Ramo medal (1991). Also, he served as the IEEE Communications Society president (1992-93), and became well-known for his (since 1981) Communicrostic crossword in the IEEE Communications Magazine. He received the SIGCOMM Award (1994).

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