Paul Eliot Green, Jr.

Co-creator of the Rake receiver and supervisor of its deployment in the first-ever spread-spectrum system, Green changed the landscape of electronic signaling. He was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and was an American electrical engineer who researched spread spectrum and radar technology. He was the son of playwright Paul Green. Green majored in Physics at the University of North Carolina. He also served in the Naval ROTC and continued in the Navy Reserve for many years, eventually retiring as a Lieutenant Commander.

He received a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1948. His master's studies focused on cryptographic research. He received a Ph.D. from M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory in 1953 on a thesis on spread spectrum, supervised by Wilbur Davenport, Robert Fano, and Jerome Wiesner. This involved co-creating the Rake receiver (with Robert Price) and supervision of its deployment in a first-ever spread-spectrum system, the Lincoln F9C in 1950.

Following his studies, he and Price (at Lincoln Laboratories) attempted to bounce radar waves off the planet Venus (1958). With Gordon Pettengill, Green 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, he became head of IBM Research, Communications department, involved in the Systems Network Architecture, in particular the Advanced peer-to-peer networking protocol. From 1988 he headed the optical communications (focusing on wavelength division multiplexing) research group that was acquired by Tellabs company, where Green worked from 1997–2000. Following his retirement, he lobbied for expanded public access to broadband technology.

He published extensively during his career; major works include "Fiber Optic Networks" (1992) and "Fiber to the Home: The New Empowerment" (2005). From 1981 he wrote the CommuniCrostics crossword in the IEEE Communications Magazine. Green was the recipient of major awards which include: Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1962); the Aerospace pioneer award (1980); elected to the National Academy of Engineering (1982); the Simon Ramo medal (1991); served as the IEEE Communications Society president (1992–93); and the SIGCOMM Award (1994).