John Bryan Taylor

Who is John Bryan Taylor?

John Bryan Taylor is a British physicist known for his important contributions to plasma physics and their application in the field of fusion energy. Notable among these is the development of the "Taylor state", describing a minimum-energy configuration that conserves magnetic helicity. Another important development was his work on the ballooning transformation, which describes the motion of plasma in toroidal configurations, which are widely used in the fusion field. Taylor has also made important contributions to the theory of the Earth's Dynamo, including the famous Taylor constraint

Taylor served in the Royal Air Force from 1950–1952, and then took his PhD at Birmingham University in 1955. Upon graduation, he joined the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, and in 1962 moved to the Culham Laboratory, where he became Chief Physicist. He held several other positions during this period, including the Commonwealth Fund Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley in 1959 to 1960, the Institute for Advanced Study in 1969, 1973 and 1980–81, and finally took the position of Fondren Professor of Plasma Theory at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989.