John Peter Costas (1923 in Wabash, Indiana – August 9, 2008) was an American electrical engineer.
He was a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on interference filtering[1] and linear systems coding.
It had "a profound effect on modern digital communications"[3] In the 1960s, he helped solve the mystery concerning poor performance of sonar systems.
He found that the rapidly time-varying channel made coherent processing inappropriate.
Costas was made a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1965 for "contributions to communications theory and techniques."