Paul graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in mathematics. He obtained the Ph. D. in mathematics from the University of California at Davis in 1970. He was awarded the I. M. Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta, following which he was on the faculty of New Mexico Highlands University 1973-1976.

In 1976 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Numerical Mathematics Group. He held positions as group or project leader in numerical mathematics or computer science 1981-1998. He received a Distinguished Physics Achievement Award in 1991. From 1987-1998 his chief responsibility was managing the computer science team for Laboratory's chief modeling program in Laser Fusion, Lasnex. In 1999 he joined the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison in the Atmospheric Sciences Division. In 2002 he left PCMDI for a position as architect for a Python-steered C++ application, Kull.  Paul retired as a member of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing in June, 2005.

Paul's work includes pioneering work on computational steering and the use of object technology for scientific programming. His skills include programming in Fortran, C++, Eiffel, Python, Perl, and Java.

His many publications include a book, Object Technology for Scientific Computing, Prentice-Hall, 1997. He was the principal author of the EiffelMath numerical software library.