Robert Price

Robert Price (7 July 1929 – 3 December 2008). Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. An American electrical engineer, known best for his research in spread spectrum and radar technology.

Price majored in physics from Princeton University followed by Sc.D. from M.I.T. (1953). He was involved in creating the Rake receiver (with Paul Green) and supervision of its deployment in a first-ever spread-spectrum system, the Lincoln F9C (1950).

Following his studies, Price and Green (at Lincoln Laboratories), attempted 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.

Robert Price was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (1985).

Awards

• National Academy of Engineering Fellow Award "For contributions to communication system theory and its use in radar contact with Venus"
• IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award (1981)
• Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee Paper Award for "A Useful Theorem for nonlinear devices having Gaussian inputs" (1988)