Jean Taylor

Jean Ellen Taylor (born 1944) is an American mathematician who is a professor emerita at Rutgers University and visiting faculty at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.

Biography Taylor was born in Northern California.

She has been married three times, to mathematicians John Guckenheimer and Frederick Almgren, and to financier and science advocate William T. Golden.

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. 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. Encyclopedia Britannica called the mathematical derivation "one of the major triumphs of global analysis".

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, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2001, she received an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke College.

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