| Birth name | Jean Ellen Taylor |
|---|---|
| Birth date | September 17, 1944 (age 81) |
| Birth place | San Mateo, California |
| Work institution | Rutgers University |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley, University of Warwick, Princeton University |
| Thesis year | 1973 |
| Doctoral advisor | Shiing-Shen Chern, Frederick J. Almgren, Jr. |
| Awards | Fellow of: |
| Spouse |
Jean Ellen Taylor[1] (born 1944)[2] is an American mathematician who is a professor emerita at Rutgers University[3] and visiting faculty at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.[4]
Biography
Taylor was born in Northern California.[5] She did her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College, graduating summa cum laude with an A.B. in 1966.[5] 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 Shiing-Shen Chern and then transferred to the University of Warwick and received a second M.Sc. in mathematics there. She completed a doctorate in 1973 from Princeton University under the supervision of Frederick J. Almgren, Jr.[5][1]
Taylor joined the Rutgers faculty in 1973, and retired in 2002.[5] She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1999 to 2001.[5][6]
She has been married three times, to mathematicians John Guckenheimer and Frederick Almgren, and to financier and science advocate William T. Golden.[5][7]
Research
Taylor is known for her work on the mathematics of soap bubbles and of the growth of crystals. In 1973 she published her dissertation on "Regularity of the Singular Set of Two-Dimensional Area-Minimizing Flat Chains Modulo 3 in R3" which solved a long-standing problem about length and smoothness of soap-film triple function curves.[8] In 1976 she, along with Almgren, 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.[9] Encyclopedia Britannica called the mathematical derivation "one of the major triumphs of global analysis".[10]
Awards and honors
Taylor is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society,[11] and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.[12] In 2001, she received an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke College.[5] In 2017, she was selected as a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class.[13]
Selected publications
- Taylor, Jean E. (1976), "The structure of singularities in soap-bubble-like and soap-film-like minimal surfaces", Annals of Mathematics. 103 (3): 489–539, Second Series, doi:10.2307/1970949. JSTOR 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. S2CID 122133930.
References
- ^
- ^ "Jean Taylor", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
- ^ Emeritus faculty listing, Rutgers University Mathematics Department, retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ Visiting members and research fellows, Courant Institute, retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ "Jean E. Taylor: Five Little Crystals and How They Grew", "Profiles of Women in Mathematics: The Emmy Noether Lectures", Association for Women in Mathematics, 2003, archived 2016-10-22 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 2012-07-04
- ^ AWM history, Association for Women in Mathematics, retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ Overbye, Dennis (October 9, 2007), "William T. Golden, Financier and Key Science Adviser, Is Dead at 97", New York Times.
- ^ "Jean Taylor". agnesscott.edu. Retrieved 2014-01-25.
- ^ Taylor (1976).
- ^ "Plateau problem | mathematics | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 2023-03-01.
- ^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-08-25.
- ^ "SIAM Fellows: Class of 2017". Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
- ^ "2018 Inaugural Class of AWM Fellows". awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2018-awm-fellows. Association for Women in Mathematics. Retrieved 9 January 2021.