john bryan taylor born 1928 in birmingham 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 minimumenergy configuration that conserves magnetic helicity another important development was his work on the ballooning transformation which describes the motion of plasma in toroidal donut configurations which are widely used in the fusion field taylor has also made important contributions to the theory of the earths dynamo including the famous taylor constrainttaylor served in the royal air force from 19501952 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 198081 and finally took the position of fondren professor of plasma theory at the university of texas at austin in 1989 taylor is still actively involved in fusion science working with culham laboratory and oxford university he was elected a fellow of the royal society in 1970taylor is best known for his work on the zeta reactor at culham in the late 1950s zeta had apparently generated fusion reactions and this apparently great advance was released to the press with great fanfare this was later found to be spurious and zeta was used to develop advanced diagnostics methods to avoid a repeat of this problem in the future while studying these improved results in 1974 taylor became interested in what he called the quiescence period after the device was fired and the experimental run had ostensibly come to an end the plasma often entered an extended period of stability from these results taylor developed what is today referred to as the taylor state which describes the minimum energy state of a plasma configuration with a given magnetic helicitytaylor initiated the study of chaos in magnetic surfaces developing several contributions to chaos theory and introducing the standard map or chirikovtaylor map he studied 2dplasmas demonstrating the inherent bohm diffusion which had been noticed in magnetic bottles since the 1950s he then played a major part in developing the ballooning transformation for toroidal plasmas along with jack connor and jim hastie which won the 2004 hannes alfvn prize