Geoffrey Ingram Taylor

Born on March 7^th of 1886 in St John’s Wood, London, where his father, Edward Ingram Taylor, had his studio. His mother Margaret was the second daughter of George Boole, Royal medallist at the age of 28.

G. I., as his friends called him attended school in Hampstead and later in 1899 he attended the University College School in Gower Street. In 1905 he won a scholarship to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he read mathematics, attending lectures by Whitehead, Whittaker and Hardy. After taking part I of the mathematics tripos, the honors examination for the Bachelor of Arts degree, in 1907, he moved towards physics taking part II of the physics tripos. In 1908 he won a scholarship to undertake research at Trinity College after gaining First Class.

His passion for science seems to have started in his school days when, together with his brother, he attended the Christmas lectures for children at the Royal Institution in 1897-98 by sir Oliver Lodge on "The principles of the electric telegraph". Taylor once wrote: "I wish I could again catch the exquisite thrill those lectures gave me. From that time I knew I wanted to be a scientist".

Taylor’s first scientific paper appeared in 1909, and in 1910 a theoretical study of shock waves, where he extended the work of Thomson, earned him the Smith Prize. That same year he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College. In 1911 he was appointed to a meteorology post and his work on turbulence in the atmosphere led to his publication Turbulent motion in fluids which won the Adams Prize at Cambridge in 1915.

The Titanic disaster of 1912 was followed by the equipping of an expedition, by the British Government and some shipping companies, to study the problem of icebergs on the Atlantic shipping routes. Early in 1913 Taylor was invited to join the Scotia, an old wooden sailing ship, as its meteorologist for the quest of icebergs. Their position was top be reported by the new radio method.

When the first world war came, G. I. offered his services as a meteorologist, but was declined, instead his skills were used at the Royal Aircraft Factory in Farnborough for the design and operation of airplanes. Here he worked, together with A. A. Griffith, on the stress on propeller shafts. This led him to think about the limiting strengths of materials and this influenced some of his later projects, such as his theory of "dislocations" in metal crystals. G. I. soon decided that to do work to his own satisfaction he must learn to fly; and in April of 1915 he left Farnborough for the Central Flying School. In the war days he also wrote an interesting paper on the shape adopted by a parachute during its descent and on the design features needed for stability.

In 1919, after World War I, Taylor returned to a lectureship of mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. One of the topics he worked on at this stage was an application of turbulent flow to oceanography. He also worked on the problem of bodies passing through a rotating fluid.

In 1923 he was appointed to one of the two Royal Society Research Professorships, an appointment that he held until his retirement at the age of sixty-five. This enabled him to stop teaching, which he had been doing for the previous four years. G. I. was not a natural lecturer and was not much interested in teaching.

Taylor was a very shy man that did not find close personal relationships easy, however, in 1925, he married Grace Stephanie Ravenhill, a school mistress in Birmingham. Their marriage was a happy one. They had no children.

His ardent love of the sea led him to own Frolic, a 19-ton cutter 48 feet long, which he navigated together with his wife. An incidental consequence was his invention of the "CQR" (secure) anchor, shaped rather like a plough-share and so connected with its stock that when dragged its tendency is to burrow deeper.

During World War II, G. I. again worked on applications of his expertise to military problems such as the propagation of blast waves, studying both waves in the air and underwater explosions. As a result of this research, Taylor elucidated a significant property of explosions, namely "even arbitrarily close to a detonating explosive the pressure in the air shock wave is less by several factors of ten than the initial pressure of the product gases of the explosive itself" (Batchelor, 1976)

During the summer of 1944 and the summer of 1945, Taylor spent a few weeks at Los Alamos (New Mexico) assisting the first experiment in atomic explosion.

He retired in 1952, at the age of 65, but he continued his work at Cambridge with little evidence that his status had in any way changed. Between the ages of 65 and 85, Taylor wrote and published 47 scientific papers.

In April 1972 he suffered a severe stroke which paralyzed the left side of his body, from which he only partially recovered but still remained with grave handicaps. During his last three years he suffered the frustrations of wanting to get back to scientific work although his physical condition would not allow it. In April of 1975 he suffered a second, but not as severe stroke.

G. I. Taylor died June 27^th of 1975 in Cambridge, England. He published over 250 papers in his long career on applied mathematics, mathematical physics and engineering, his contribution can be summed as of greatest importance to the mechanics of fluids and solids and to their application in meteorology, oceanography, aeronautics, metal physics, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering. The nature of his thinking was like that of Stokes, Kelvin and Rayleigh, although he got more from experiments than any one of these three. He had the rare honor of seeing his scientific papers, some previously unpublished, gathered together and published in four thick volumes during his lifetime.

University of Cambridge in 1957,

University of Bristol in 1959,

University of Paris in 1961 and

University of Michigan in 1967.

De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society in 1956,

Panetti Prize and Medal of the Academia de la Scienze di Torino in 1958,

Dutch Medal of the Akkademia van Wetenschafen in 1958,

Tomoshenko Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1958,

Kelvin Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1959,

Trasenter Medal of the Universite de Liege in 1961,

Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1962,

Albert Sauveur Achievement Award of the American Society of Metals in 1962,

Faraday Award in 1962,

Medal of Honor of the Rice University in 1962,

Platinum Medal of the Institution of Metals in 1964,

James Watt Medal of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1965,

Order of Merit in 1969,

Von Karman Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1969,

Jubilee Medal of the American Meteorological Society in 1970,

Von Karman Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1972,

Medal of Honor of the Danish Metallurgical Society in 1973.

Royal Society in 1919,

Indian Academy of Sciences in 1952,

Institution of Civil Engineers in 1955,

Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1955,

American Philosophical Society in 1955,

American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956,

Manchester College of Science and Technology in 1959,

Turin Academy of Science in 1961,

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1963,

Academy of Sciences of USSR in 1966,

American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1967 and

Polish Academy of Sciences in 1970.

Batchelor, G. K., 1976. Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London, vol. 22, pp. 565-834.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Taylor_Geoffrey.html

Southwell, R. V., 1956. G. I. Taylor: A Biographical Note, Surveys in Mechanics, G. I. Taylor 70^th Anniversary Volume, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-6.