Person: Paley, Raymond Edward Alan Christopher

Raymond Paley was an English mathematician who worked in interpolation and allied trigonometrical problems. He died in a skiing accident.

Raymond Paley was educated at Eton.
Paley had already proved impressive results on Fourier series and had collaborated with Littlewood, his supervisor.
Zygmund discovered Paley's extraordinary talent and the two worked jointly on existence proofs, brilliantly applying ideas from Borel's Calcul des probabilités dénombrables.
Zygmund's book Trigonometric Series published in 1935 owes a debt to the joint work that he carried out with Paley.
Norbert Wiener was proving important results in areas of interest to Paley so he applied for a Rockefeller International Research Fellowship to allow him to travel to the United States to collaborate with him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For a young man of 26, Paley had collaborated with a remarkable group of mathematicians.
Already with a reputation remarkable for one so young, Paley stood on the brink of becoming one of the very first rank of research mathematicians.
Mr Paley was skiing alone at an altitude of 9,600 ft, but his death was witnessed by companions lower down the mountainside.
Norbert Wiener gave the Colloquium Lectures of the American Mathematical Society in 1934 and spoke on Paley's work.
Paley was to have been a Colloquium Lecturer himself.
In a group notable for its brilliant technique, no one had developed this technique to a higher degree than Paley.

Born 7 January 1907, Bournemouth, England. Died 7 April 1933, Banff, Alberta, Canada.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin England

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive