Joseph H Taylor Jr

As a high school student at Moorestown (N.J.) Friends, Taylor excelled in mathematics, a subject he pursued at Haverford College before switching to physics. A particular influence was his senior adviser, Thomas Benham, a blind professor. After graduating from Haverford in 1963, Taylor entered the astronomy department at Harvard. He knew from the beginning that he wanted to work in radio astronomy. His dissertation involved locating radio sources by a technique called lunar occultation. (The radio telescopes of the day lacked the resolution to pinpoint small-diameter radio sources. But if such a source lay in the moon's orbital path, it blinked out whenever the moon moved between it and the earth. The moon's location thus revealed the source's.) Says Taylor, "In January 1968 I finished up my thesis. I was tired of occultations, and I was looking for something new to do." A month later, Bell and Hewish published their paper about the pulsar they had discovered the previous August. Taylor had found his new project, and he has never looked back. Taylor spent 11 years at the University of Massachusetts, and by 1980, when he accepted an offer from Princeton, he was regarded as one of the nation's leading radio astronomers. In 1984, he and several Princeton students began a systematic search for "millisecond" pulsars-those that flash in excess of 100 times a second. (The first millisecond pulsar had been discovered in 1982. Of the few dozen now known, Taylor's group has found about half. Most of the known millisecond pulars are binary.)