In Memoriam: Howard Taylor, 79

Howard Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Physics at USC Dornsife, has died. He was 79.

Taylor died at home in Los Angeles surrounded by his wife and family on May 17.

“Howard Taylor was a brilliant research chemist, and a loyal and involved USC faculty member, for the past five decades,” said University Professor Solomon Golomb, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, and Andrew and Erna Viterbi Chair in Communications at USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.”

A highly imaginative theorist in both chemistry and physics, Taylor joined USC Dornsife in 1961. His early career was distinguished by the notable contributions he made to quantum chemistry and to the problem of describing, understanding and computing, through quantum mechanics, the properties and reactions of very short-lived states of atomic and molecular negative ions, or anions. These so called “resonances” are intermediaries implicated in the way electrons scatter from matter.

Inspired by pioneering experimentalists such as George Schultz and Helmut Erhardt, who studied electron scattering, Taylor’s primary goal was to explain what these scientists were seeing in their detectors. They observed features that suggested the presence of long-lived temporary anions. Taylor used his expertise as a quantum chemist to devise an approach, termed the stabilization method, to explain what these scientists were observing. 

This new method of carrying out quantum scattering computations found wide use in many fields of chemistry and physics. Taylor’s theory, while initially criticized, turned out to provide significant advances not only in explaining known resonant states, but in predicting some that had not been seen.

Taylor’s interest then turned to studies in nonlinear dynamics and chaotic phenomena. This research was central to the development of an algebraic method that could assign quantum numbers and reveal the types of vibrational motion that underlay the observed spectra of molecules in the region of high vibrations. The bending spectrum of acetylene, a molecule important in combustion and whose spectrum had long been described as “unassignable,” was the breakthrough example. 

Taylor retired from USC Dornsife in 2005 but continued his research. Using ideas similar to those used in his stabilization method, he developed a signal processing technique that, when applied to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), yielded a spectrum with significantly greater sensitivity and resolution. NMR, widely used in modern chemistry, enables scientists to definitively identify chemical compounds. Taylor’s advance lowered the cost of collecting certain key NMR data. 

Surya Prakash, George A. and Judith A. Olah Nobel Laureate Chair in Hydrocarbon Chemistry and professor of chemistry, described Taylor as a friend and a distinguished chemical physicist.

“Howard spent his entire academic career of 44 years at USC contributing to the eminence and growth of the USC Dornsife chemistry department,” said Prakash, director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. “In recent years, he developed clever mathematical methods as an efficient alternative to Fourier Transformation for improving signal to noise ratio of time averaged signals. This has potential applications to many fields of spectroscopy including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging. The scientific community will miss him dearly.”

Howard Taylor made notable contributions to quantum chemistry in a career at USC Dornsife that spanned more than four decades.

The elder son of the vice president of a clothing manufacturing business and a housewife, Taylor was born and raised in New York City. He was a highly gifted student who won awards for mathematics and history in high school. He attended Columbia College at Columbia University in the City of New York, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree and graduating summa cum laude with a distinction in chemistry in 1956. In 1959, he received a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He spent the following two years as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.

Taylor’s career at USC Dornsife was punctuated by three sabbaticals. He spent the academic year of 1966-67 at the Physics Institute at Freiburg University in Germany. From 1974 to 1975 he returned to Germany to spend a year at the Theoretical Chemistry Institute at the Technical University of Munich. From 1982 to 1983, he spent a sabbatical year at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, Holland.

Shorter stays were spent at universities in Pisa, Italy; Bielefeld, Germany; Cuernavaca, Mexico; Uppsala, Sweden; Paris, France; and London, United Kingdom.

“My father loved life,” Taylor’s daughter Leeza Taylor Reisig said. “He was a straightforward and practical man, but very loving. He had a big personality and was a true patriarch in our family. He also had good friends all over the world, some of the oldest of whom dated back to his kindergarten days in the Bronx.”

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, since 1972, of the American Physical Society, Taylor was honored with the USC Associates Award for Creative Scholarship and Research in 1974. Among the many other prestigious honors he received during his career were awards from the Humboldt Society, the Fulbright Foundation, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, the Sloan Foundation and the Dutch Government. In 1992, the German Ministry of Science, through the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, presented him with the Max Planck Research Award for Atomic and Molecular Physics. 

Stephen Bradforth, professor and chair of chemistry, remembers Taylor as a big personality.

“When I arrived in the mid-90s, my office was sandwiched between his and the office of his postdocs and senior scientists, along with the blackboard where mathematical ideas were hashed out,” he said. “Intense discussions backwards and forwards between the two rooms were the daily norm, and I was often pulled in for them to test ideas on an ‘innocent’ third party. I learned a lot!”

Taylor loved to travel and explore new cities, food and culture with his family. A long-standing member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he was a classical music enthusiast.

“We will always remember Howard Taylor, a devoted, loving husband, loving father to his three daughters and loving grandfather to his four grandchildren,” Taylor’s family said in a written statement. “Nobody will forget his laugh — so uninhibited, right from the belly and always with a glint in his eye. His abounding humor kept us all cheerful and hopeful. He was a man whose presence promised excitement, interesting times, intelligent insight and a sympathetic ear.

“In his midst there was safety and integrity, a home whose doors were always open unconditionally. Where there was a problem, he sought a solution; where there was unhappiness, he brought hope. His patience for the concerns of others was endless. The good fortune of others brought him pleasure as if it was his own. He was a family man above all who held his family close to his heart, a bond that can never be broken.” 

Taylor is survived by his wife of 56 years, Harriet; by his three daughters, Rachel Shapiro Taylor, Leeza Taylor Reisig and Jacqueline Greene; and four grandchildren, Lucy Taylor, Emily Reisig, Vaughn Reisig and Danny Greene.

A private celebration of Taylor’s life will be held at his family home in Los Angeles.

An invitation-only workshop in Taylor’s honor titled “Advances in Theory of Electronic Resonances” will be held during an upcoming symposium at the Telluride Science Research Center in Colorado from July 20-24. All those who knew Taylor are invited to submit a note about their interactions with him to bis@nist.gov. These notes will be read out at the meeting.