Paul Baran
| Paul Baran | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 29, 1926 Grodno, Poland (now Belarus) |
| Died | March 26, 2011 (aged 84) Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Institutions | RAND Corporation |
| Alma mater |
UCLA (M.S., 1959) Drexel Institute of Technology (B.S., 1949) Philadelphia |
| Known for | Packet Switching |
| Notable awards | IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1990) Computer History Museum Fellow (2005) Marconi Prize (1991) NMTI (2007) National Inventors Hall of Fame |
| Spouse | Evelyn Murphy Baran, PhD |
Paul Baran (/ˈbærən/; April 29, 1926 – March 26, 2011) was a Polish-born American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He was one of the two independent inventors of packet switched computer networking, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of modern digital communication.
Paul Baran was born in Grodno (then Second Polish Republic, now part of Belarus) on April 29, 1926. He was the youngest of three children in a Polish-Jewish family, with the Yiddish given name "Pesach". His family moved to the United States on May 11, 1928, settling in Boston and later in Philadelphia, where his father, Morris "Moshe" Baran (1884–1979), opened a grocery store. He graduated from Drexel University in 1949 (then called Drexel Institute of Technology), with a degree in electrical engineering. He then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, where he did technical work on UNIVAC models, the first brand of commercial computers in the USA. In 1955 he married Evelyn Murphy, moved to Los Angeles, and worked for Hughes Aircraft on radar data processing systems. He obtained his master's degree in engineering from UCLA in 1959, with advisor Gerald Estrin while taking night classes. His thesis was on character recognition. While Baran initially stayed on at UCLA to pursue his doctorate, a heavy travel and work schedule forced him to abandon his doctoral work.
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