Athanasios Papoulis is a Greek-American engineer and applied mathematician. He was born in Greece in 1921 and graduated from National Technical University of Athens.

He has contributed in the areas of signal processing, communications, and signal and system theory. His classic book Probability Random Variables and Stochastic Processes has been and is being used as a textbook in many graduate-level probability courses in electrical engineering departments all over the world. The book is widely used due to its balance between rigor and intuition. Hence, by staying away from complete mathematical rigor while emphasizing the physical and engineering interpretations of probability, his book gained wide popularity.