Richard Sheldon Palais (born May 22, 1931) is an American mathematician working in differential geometry.

His PhD thesis, entitled A Global Formulation of the Lie Theory of Transformation Groups, was supervised by Andrew M. Gleason and George Mackey.

[1] Palais was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Chicago from 1956 to 1958 and at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1958 to 1960.

[8] Palais' research interests include differential geometry, the theory of compact differentiable groups of transformations, the geometry of submanifolds, Morse theory and non-linear global analysis.

His doctoral students include Edward Bierstone, Leslie Lamport, Jill P. Mesirov, Chuu-lian Terng, and Karen Uhlenbeck.