His father was a battalion commander in the 51st Lithuanian Regiment and the family may have had origins in Greece.
He was educated locally at then at Poltava before he went to the Universities of Berlin and later Strasbourg where he met L. I. Mandelshtam.
Together they studied radiowaves under Carl Ferdinand Braun who headed the Institute of Physics.
[2][3] In 1947 he was involved in examining radio wave emissions from the Sun and had organized an expedition to Brazil where a total solar eclipse was expected.
Papaleksi died before the expedition could set out,[4] but it was successful in demonstrating radio wave emission by solar coronae.