John Bryan Taylor (born 26 December 1928)^[1][2] is a Britishphysicist known for his contributions toplasma physics and their application in the field offusion energy. Notable among these is the development of the "Taylor state", describing a minimum-energy configuration that conservesmagnetic helicity.^[3][4] Another development was his work on theballooning transformation, which describes the motion of plasma intoroidal (donut) configurations, which are used in the fusion field.^[5][6] Taylor has also made contributions to the theory ofthe Earth's Dynamo, including the Taylor constraint.^[7]

Taylor was born inBirmingham. He served in theRoyal Air Force from 1950 to 1952, and then took his PhD atBirmingham University in 1955. Upon graduation, he joined theAtomic Weapons Establishment atAldermaston, and in 1962 moved to theCulham Laboratory, where he became Chief Physicist. He held several other positions during this period, including the Commonwealth Fund Fellow at theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1959 to 1960, theInstitute for Advanced Study in 1969, 1973 and 1980–81, and finally took the position of Fondren Professor of Plasma Theory at theUniversity of Texas at Austin in 1989. Taylor is still actively involved in fusion science, working with Culham laboratory andOxford University. He was elected aFellow of the Royal Society in 1970.^[8]

Taylor won theInstitute of Physics'sJames Clerk Maxwell Medal and Prize in 1971,^[9] and theMax Born Medal and Prize in 1979.^[10] He then went on to win theAmerican Physical Society'sJames Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 1999.^[11]

Taylor initiated the study of chaos in magnetic surfaces, developing several contributions tochaos theory and introducing the "standard map" (or Chirikov–Taylor map).^[12][13] He studied 2D-plasmas, demonstrating the inherentBohm diffusion which had been noticed in magnetic bottles since the 1950s.^[14][15] He then played a major part in developing the "ballooning transformation" for toroidal plasmas, along with Jack Connor and Jim Hastie, which won him the 2004Hannes Alfvén Prize.^[16]

• 1928 births
• Living people
• British nuclear physicists
• Fellows of the Royal Society
• Maxwell Medal and Prize recipients
• Alumni of the University of Birmingham
• University of California, Berkeley people
• University of Texas at Austin faculty
• Fellows of the American Physical Society

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• Use British English from August 2016
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