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Geoffrey Taylor
Times obituary
Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, O.M., F.R.S., who died on June 27 at the age of 89, was one of the most notable scientists of this century. Over a period of more than 50 years, he produced a steady stream of contributions of the highest originality and importance to the mechanics of fluids and solids and to their application in meteorology, aeronautics, and many branches of engineering. He occupied a leading position in applied mathematics, in classical physics, and in engineering science, and was equally at home with the methods and attitudes of these three disciplines.
Through a combination of penetrating insight, deceptively simple mathematical analysis, and correspondingly ingenious experiments, he was able to illuminate a large number of phenomena of different kinds. Many of his scientific contributions opened up whole new fields; he had the knack of being first. He was the personification of the peculiarly British tradition of applied mathematics and carried forward the type of thought represented by Newton, Maxwell, Stokes, and Rayleigh. Profoundly original scientific thought came easily to him, and his character was entirely free from strain, artificiality, or vanity.
He was born in London on March 7, 1886, to a family in which genius had already appeared. His mother, Margaret, was the second daughter of George Boole, one of the pioneers of mathematical logic, whose third daughter, Alice, also had remarkable mathematical ability but no formal training. His father was an artist. At University College School, Taylor had already been attracted to mathematics and science; and later at Cambridge, where he began a lifelong association with Trinity College, he took first the Mathematical Tripos Part I and then the Natural Sciences Tripos Part II.
Embarking on research, he made his mark immediately with two successful pieces of work: one an experiment undertaken at J. J. Thomson's suggestion to test the new quantum theory, and the other a mathematical determination of the thickness of a shock wave. In 1910, he was elected into a Prize Fellowship at Trinity. A year later, he was appointed Reader in Dynamical Meteorology at Cambridge which was a temporary office founded to encourage the study of meteorology. Taylor's newly aroused interest in atmospheric motions was retained for many years and led to several important advances, including his pioneering work on turbulence. In 1913 he acted as meteorologist on the ship Scotia sent to initiate an ice patrol in the North Atlantic, following the sinking of the Titanic; and in his spare time he flew kites from the masthead in order to obtain measurements of pressure, humidity, and temperature at various heights above the sea surface, on which he based new theories about the vertical transfer of heat and water vapour by turbulent mixing of the air.
Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, Taylor and a number of other Cambridge men joined the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough to assist in experimental work in aeronautics. Characteristically adding adventure to his intellectual pursuits, Taylor decided that he should learn to fly as a part of this new work, and also to parachute, and did so. Aeronautics became another field of science in which he was to remain interested and to which he continued to make fundamental contributions.
After the war, he returned to Trinity College as a lecturer in mathematics and became a close friend of Rutherford. Rutherford gave him facilities to work in the Cavendish Laboratory, in a room adjacent to his own. This happy association with the Cavendish Laboratory and Taylor's appointment in 1923 to a Yarrow Research Professorship, newly established by the Royal Society, opened up a tremendously productive phase of his research life, which was to last until 1939.
During that period, he made his most substantial and significant contributions to continuum mechanics, two of which stand out for comment. While at Farnborough, he had been concerned with calculations of the strength of aircraft spars, and this led him later to think about the mechanism of plastic deformation of metals under load. A series of papers led him in 1934 to the idea that plastic strain of a metal crystal occurs by the sliding of one plane of atoms over another over a finite area of the slip plane, which is bounded by a regularity, or "dislocation," in the arrangement of the atoms. The concept of a dislocation and the related theory of strain hardening have provided the basis for much of the subsequent research in metal physics. The other of the two major advances concerned the turbulent motion of fluids.
As early as 1921, he had realized that analysis of the eddying and irregular motion of a fluid involved the statistics of continuous functions, and that the current representation of the fluid as a collection of discrete lumps was not adequate. But he was far ahead of his contemporaries, and it was not until after he had consolidated and extended his statistical description of turbulence in a series of papers published between 1935 and 1938 that the full significance of his work was appreciated. Both these major advances opened up new fields of work which were taken up by many scientists, and this was Taylor's cue to move on to other problems; he always preferred the simple mathematics and experiments that are appropriate for initial discoveries.
During the Second World War, his services were much in demand by government committees, and he worked on a wide variety of defence problems, including underwater explosions and their effects on structures, dispersal of fog from aeroplane runways by lines of burners, the fragmentation of bomb casings, the ranges of large rockets, shaped charges for piercing armour plating, spherically expanding blast waves due to the release of a large amount of energy (an atomic bomb), and a host of others.
In the closing phase of his scientific life, from 1945 onwards, he continued, with undiminished zest and enjoyment, to devise beautiful investigations of whatever new phenomena took his fancy. He retired from his research professorship in 1952, although the Royal Society continued to support him and there was no change. Whatever his mode of life, his research in this phase followed no strategic plan, and to others he sometimes seemed to be equally interested in the trivial and the profound; but anything he touched turned to scientific gold and no longer looked trivial.
He studied the method of swimming of very small creatures such as spermatazoa, the movement of large gas bubbles through water, thin sheets of liquid in air, the hydrodynamics of paper-making machines, a novel form of cavitation bubble in viscous liquids, and many other byways of fluid dynamics. All these problems were relatively untouched; they could be studied by experiments performed on a small table and by mathematics covering one or more sheets of paper, and he saw that they had potentialities.
Taylor wrote over 200 scientific papers, of uniformly high quality and value, which have been collected and republished by Cambridge University Press in four large volumes.
Taylor was honoured for his work by a host of universities and learned societies in many countries. He enjoyed being fêted, with the simple pleasure of one who never took it for granted, that his work deserved recognition. He was appointed OM in 1969.
No account of Taylor's life would be complete without references to his non-scientific activities. One cannot say "recreations" or "leisure interests", for work was play to Taylor; even "non-scientific" is not wholly right, for he was inventive while he played. He was passionately fond of small boats and sailing from boylhood, and sailed with his wife in their 19-ton cutter to the Shetlands, to Norway and to the Lofoten Islands. The anchor of the boat was awkwardly heavy, so Taylor designed a new one with a blade like a ploughshare which buried itself to the right depth in the seabed when dragged along. The new anchor was subsequently used by the Admiralty, in particular for holding "Mulberry" harbours in position. Travel always appealed to him, especially if it took him to strange places unknown to tourists and unspoiled by material development. With his wife, he explored Borneo in 1929 after attending a Pacific Science Congress. He was a keen and perceptive botanist and took great pleasure in the familiar plants of his well-stocked garden in Cambridge and in what he saw elsewhere in England and abroad. These pleasures made no demands on other people and were shared with a few only.
In 1925, he married Stephanie Ravenhill and began a happy and lifelong partnership. They had no children. His wife died in 1967.
Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, O.M., F.R.S., who died on June 27 at the age of 89, was one of the most notable scientists of this century. Over a period of more than 50 years, he produced a steady stream of contributions of the highest originality and importance to the mechanics of fluids and solids and to their application in meteorology, aeronautics, and many branches of engineering. He occupied a leading position in applied mathematics, in classical physics, and in engineering science, and was equally at home with the methods and attitudes of these three disciplines.
Through a combination of penetrating insight, deceptively simple mathematical analysis, and correspondingly ingenious experiments, he was able to illuminate a large number of phenomena of different kinds. Many of his scientific contributions opened up whole new fields; he had the knack of being first. He was the personification of the peculiarly British tradition of applied mathematics and carried forward the type of thought represented by Newton, Maxwell, Stokes, and Rayleigh. Profoundly original scientific thought came easily to him, and his character was entirely free from strain, artificiality, or vanity.
He was born in London on March 7, 1886, to a family in which genius had already appeared. His mother, Margaret, was the second daughter of George Boole, one of the pioneers of mathematical logic, whose third daughter, Alice, also had remarkable mathematical ability but no formal training. His father was an artist. At University College School, Taylor had already been attracted to mathematics and science; and later at Cambridge, where he began a lifelong association with Trinity College, he took first the Mathematical Tripos Part I and then the Natural Sciences Tripos Part II.
Embarking on research, he made his mark immediately with two successful pieces of work: one an experiment undertaken at J. J. Thomson's suggestion to test the new quantum theory, and the other a mathematical determination of the thickness of a shock wave. In 1910, he was elected into a Prize Fellowship at Trinity. A year later, he was appointed Reader in Dynamical Meteorology at Cambridge which was a temporary office founded to encourage the study of meteorology. Taylor's newly aroused interest in atmospheric motions was retained for many years and led to several important advances, including his pioneering work on turbulence. In 1913 he acted as meteorologist on the ship Scotia sent to initiate an ice patrol in the North Atlantic, following the sinking of the Titanic; and in his spare time he flew kites from the masthead in order to obtain measurements of pressure, humidity, and temperature at various heights above the sea surface, on which he based new theories about the vertical transfer of heat and water vapour by turbulent mixing of the air.
Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, Taylor and a number of other Cambridge men joined the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough to assist in experimental work in aeronautics. Characteristically adding adventure to his intellectual pursuits, Taylor decided that he should learn to fly as a part of this new work, and also to parachute, and did so. Aeronautics became another field of science in which he was to remain interested and to which he continued to make fundamental contributions.
After the war, he returned to Trinity College as a lecturer in mathematics and became a close friend of Rutherford. Rutherford gave him facilities to work in the Cavendish Laboratory, in a room adjacent to his own. This happy association with the Cavendish Laboratory and Taylor's appointment in 1923 to a Yarrow Research Professorship, newly established by the Royal Society, opened up a tremendously productive phase of his research life, which was to last until 1939.
During that period, he made his most substantial and significant contributions to continuum mechanics, two of which stand out for comment. While at Farnborough, he had been concerned with calculations of the strength of aircraft spars, and this led him later to think about the mechanism of plastic deformation of metals under load. A series of papers led him in 1934 to the idea that plastic strain of a metal crystal occurs by the sliding of one plane of atoms over another over a finite area of the slip plane, which is bounded by a regularity, or "dislocation," in the arrangement of the atoms. The concept of a dislocation and the related theory of strain hardening have provided the basis for much of the subsequent research in metal physics. The other of the two major advances concerned the turbulent motion of fluids.
As early as 1921, he had realized that analysis of the eddying and irregular motion of a fluid involved the statistics of continuous functions, and that the current representation of the fluid as a collection of discrete lumps was not adequate. But he was far ahead of his contemporaries, and it was not until after he had consolidated and extended his statistical description of turbulence in a series of papers published between 1935 and 1938 that the full significance of his work was appreciated. Both these major advances opened up new fields of work which were taken up by many scientists, and this was Taylor's cue to move on to other problems; he always preferred the simple mathematics and experiments that are appropriate for initial discoveries.
During the Second World War, his services were much in demand by government committees, and he worked on a wide variety of defence problems, including underwater explosions and their effects on structures, dispersal of fog from aeroplane runways by lines of burners, the fragmentation of bomb casings, the ranges of large rockets, shaped charges for piercing armour plating, spherically expanding blast waves due to the release of a large amount of energy (an atomic bomb), and a host of others.
In the closing phase of his scientific life, from 1945 onwards, he continued, with undiminished zest and enjoyment, to devise beautiful investigations of whatever new phenomena took his fancy. He retired from his research professorship in 1952, although the Royal Society continued to support him and there was no change. Whatever his mode of life, his research in this phase followed no strategic plan, and to others he sometimes seemed to be equally interested in the trivial and the profound; but anything he touched turned to scientific gold and no longer looked trivial.
He studied the method of swimming of very small creatures such as spermatazoa, the movement of large gas bubbles through water, thin sheets of liquid in air, the hydrodynamics of paper-making machines, a novel form of cavitation bubble in viscous liquids, and many other byways of fluid dynamics. All these problems were relatively untouched; they could be studied by experiments performed on a small table and by mathematics covering one or more sheets of paper, and he saw that they had potentialities.
Taylor wrote over 200 scientific papers, of uniformly high quality and value, which have been collected and republished by Cambridge University Press in four large volumes.
Taylor was honoured for his work by a host of universities and learned societies in many countries. He enjoyed being fêted, with the simple pleasure of one who never took it for granted, that his work deserved recognition. He was appointed OM in 1969.
No account of Taylor's life would be complete without references to his non-scientific activities. One cannot say "recreations" or "leisure interests", for work was play to Taylor; even "non-scientific" is not wholly right, for he was inventive while he played. He was passionately fond of small boats and sailing from boylhood, and sailed with his wife in their 19-ton cutter to the Shetlands, to Norway and to the Lofoten Islands. The anchor of the boat was awkwardly heavy, so Taylor designed a new one with a blade like a ploughshare which buried itself to the right depth in the seabed when dragged along. The new anchor was subsequently used by the Admiralty, in particular for holding "Mulberry" harbours in position. Travel always appealed to him, especially if it took him to strange places unknown to tourists and unspoiled by material development. With his wife, he explored Borneo in 1929 after attending a Pacific Science Congress. He was a keen and perceptive botanist and took great pleasure in the familiar plants of his well-stocked garden in Cambridge and in what he saw elsewhere in England and abroad. These pleasures made no demands on other people and were shared with a few only.
In 1925, he married Stephanie Ravenhill and began a happy and lifelong partnership. They had no children. His wife died in 1967.
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