Jean Taylor

Biography

Taylor was born on September 17, 1944 in San Mateo, California; her father was a lawyer, her mother a schoolteacher, and she had two siblings. She did her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College, graduating summa cum laude with an A.B. in 1966. She began her graduate studies in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, but after receiving an M.Sc. she switched to mathematics under the mentorship of S. S. Chern and then transferred to the University of Warwick and received a second M.Sc. in mathematics there. She completed a doctorate in 1972 from Princeton University under the supervision of Frederick J. Almgren, Jr.

Taylor joined the Rutgers faculty in 1973, and retired in 2002. She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1999 to 2001.

She has been married three times, to mathematician John Guckenheimer (her fellow student at Berkeley), to her advisor Fred Almgren (with whom she had a daughter and two step-children), and to financier and science advocate William T. Golden.

Research

Taylor is known for her work on the mathematics of soap bubbles and of the growth of crystals. In 1976 she published the first proof of Plateau's laws, a description of the shapes formed by soap bubble clusters that had been formulated without proof in the 19th century by Joseph Plateau.

Awards and honors

Taylor is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Women in Mathematics, the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2001, she received an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke. In 2017, she was selected as a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class.

Selected publications

• Taylor, Jean E. (1976), "The structure of singularities in soap-bubble-like and soap-film-like minimal surfaces", Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, 103 (3): 489–539, doi:10.2307/1970949, MR 0428181.
• Taylor, J. E.; Cahn, J. W.; Handwerker, C. A. (1992), "Overview No. 98. I. Geometric models of crystal growth", Acta Metallurgica et Materialia, 40 (7): 1443–1474, doi:10.1016/0956-7151(92)90090-2.
• Taylor, J. E. (1992), "Overview No. 98. II. Mean curvature and weighted mean curvature", Acta Metallurgica et Materialia, 40 (7): 1475–1485, doi:10.1016/0956-7151(92)90091-R.
• Almgren, Fred; Taylor, Jean E.; Wang, Lihe (1993), "Curvature-driven flows: a variational approach", SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, 31 (2): 387–438, doi:10.1137/0331020, MR 1205983.
• Cahn, J. W.; Taylor, J. E. (1994), "Overview No. 113. Surface motion by surface diffusion", Acta Metallurgica et Materialia, 42 (4): 1045–1053, doi:10.1016/0956-7151(94)90123-6.
• Taylor, Jean E. (2003), "Some mathematical challenges in materials science", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 40 (1): 69–87, doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-02-00967-9, MR 1943134.
• Taylor, Jean E. (2006), "Soap bubbles and crystals", Resonance, 11 (6): 26–30, doi:10.1007/BF02838879.