Daniel Ray coauthored the 1971 analytic torsion paper with Isadore Singer. The original prints D. B. Ray; the author-hosted account by Singer's former student John Lott explicitly identifies him as Daniel Ray.[ref]
https://math.berkeley.edu/~lott/torsion.pdf. Introduction, p. 17, identifies Daniel Ray and Isadore Singer
Their construction extracts a geometric invariant from spectra of Laplacians on differential forms. A spectral zeta function makes it possible to define a regularized determinant, which contributes to analytic torsion. Their paper establishes metric-independence under its hypotheses and motivates comparison with a combinatorial invariant.[ref]
R-torsion and the Laplacian on Riemannian manifolds by Daniel Ray and Isadore Singer. Introduction, Definition 1.6 and section 2
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