CommuniCrostics Author

Paul Green 

Dr. Paul E. Green, Jr. has been President of the IEEE Communications Society, and the Information Theory Society. He has been a Fellow of the IEEE since 1962, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Russian Popov Society, and has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the IEEE Ramo Medal.

Dr. Paul Green, Jr. was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1924, the son of libertarian and Pulitzer Prize playwright Paul Green and his equally literary wife, Elizabeth. He majored in physics while in the Navel ROTC at the University of North Carolina, retiring from the reserve many years later as a Lieutenant Commander.

He received his M.S. degree in Electrical engineering from NC State in 1948, and his Doctor of Science degree from MIT in 1953.

During his 18 years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he pioneered the first operational spread spectrum communication system, invented and built the Rake anti-multipath system, large seismometer arrays, and invented planetary range-doppler mapping, still used whenever one needs to make a reflectivity picture of an object (like a rotating planet or a tumbling missile) that is unresolvable in antenna beamwidth. Rake, the spread spectrum add-on, which is widely used in today’s cell phones, was a joint creation with his closest colleague Robert Price.

After joining IBM in 1969, he shuttled between management jobs, original research (mostly on computer networks) and corporate technical staff work. His group made its biggest contribution by originating and prototyping a new generation of IBM’s comprehensive System Network Architecture.

In 1988 he initiated a program at IBM Research to develop “all-optical” networks, using the immense capacity of optical fiber, the new optical amplifiers, and projected photonic switching centers to build networks of multi-petabit capacity that would be passive and protocol-insensitive, and thus essentially future-proof. Paul Green, Rajiv Ramaswami and their team built and commercialized the first optical dense WDM product (the IBM 9729), after having deployed the first operational dynamic multi-party all-optical network, Rainbow-1, both systems employing 20 different wavelengths, 10 in each direction.

Two years before his retirement in 2000, Green’s IBM group was acquired by Tellabs.

Paul has been the author of many technical papers, and the editor of a number of book collaborations including computer communications (1974, with R. Lucky), computer network architectures and protocols (1982), and network interconnection and protocol conversion (1988). He is the author of two books: Fiber Optic Networks (1993) and Fiber to the Home – The New Empowerment (2006).

Created by Paul Green
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