A design procedure for the receiver of a pulse amplitude modulation system is developed for data transmission in the presence of intersymbol interference and noise. In the receiver, an estimate of each source symbol is made based on the WienerKolmogorov theory of minimum variance estimation for stationary time series. The resulting structure is called a recursive equalizer and its taps are obtained by taking the canonical factorization of the spectral density function followed by the operations of polynomial multiplication and division. The performance of the system is evaluated by calculating the probability of error versus signal-signal-to-noise ratio and Comparing it to the performance of a conventional tapped delay line equalizer. The specific example presented uses raised-cosine signaling through a channel with slope-attenuation distortion and a zero phase characteristic. For this example, the recursive equalizer is shown to exhibit superior-performance.