Wilbur B. Davenport Jr. (1920 - August 28, 2003) was an American engineer and scientist, known for his work on communications systems.
He received his S.M. (1943) and Ph.D. (1950) from M.I.T. where he became assistant professor (1949–53) and professor (1960–82). From 1951 he worked with Lincoln Lab as leader of the research group on communication

Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...

s technology. He published Probability and Random Processes (1975) and An Introduction to the Theory of Random Signals and Noise with William L. Root (1958). Davenport was elected to the National Academy of Engineering

National Academy of Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...

 (1975) and received the IEEE Pioneer Award (1981) for his spread spectrum

Spread spectrum

Spread-spectrum techniques are methods by which a signal generated in a particular bandwidth is deliberately spread in the frequency domain, resulting in a signal with a wider bandwidth...

 research with Paul E. Green

Paul Green (engineer)

Paul Eliot Green, Jr. is an American electrical engineer, famous for his research in spread spectrum and radar technology. He was the son of playwright Paul Green....

, Mortimer Rogoff and Louis A. deRosa.