Paul Baran

Paul Baran (born April 29, 1926, Grodno, Poland [now Hrodna, Belarus]—died March 26, 2011, Palo Alto, California, U.S.) was an American electrical engineer, inventor of the distributed network and, contemporaneously with British computer scientist Donald Davies, of data packet switching across distributed networks. These inventions were the foundation for the Internet. In 1928 Baran’s family moved to Philadelphia. Baran studied electrical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia (B.S., 1949) and engineering at the University of...