Raymond Paley


Raymond Edward Alan Christopher Paley was an English mathematician. Paley was born in Bournemouth, England. He was educated at Eton. From there he entered Trinity College, Cambridge where he showed himself as a brilliant student. He won a Smith's Prize in 1930 and was elected a fellow of Trinity College.
His contributions include the Paley construction for Hadamard matrices and his collaboration with Norbert Wiener in the Paley–Wiener theorem. He collaborated with A. Zygmund on Fourier series and worked with J. E. Littlewood on what became known as Littlewood–Paley theory, an application of real-variable techniques in complex analysis.
In 1932, he introduced the dyadic basis with regard to Walsh functions.
On 7 April 1933, Paley was killed by an avalanche when skiing alone at an altitude of 9,600 ft at Fossil Mountain, Banff, Alberta in the Canadian Rockies. His death was witnessed by companions lower down the mountainside. Park wardens and a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recovered the body: he is buried in the Banff Town Cemetery.