Howard S Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Southern California, died after a valiant battle with cancer at the age of 79 on May 17, 2015 at his family home in Los Angeles. Born and raised in New York City, Taylor graduated in 1956 from Columbia College, Columbia University, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Highest Honors and with Distinction in Chemistry. In 1959 he received a PhD in Chemical Physics from the University of California at Berkeley under the direction of Professor Frank E. Harris.
During the following two years he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow as a member of the Faculty of Chemistry in the Service of Chemical Physics directed by I. Prigogine at the Free University of Brussels. In 1961, he joined the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Southern California where he spent his entire career, punctuated by three Sabbatical years: 1966-67: The Physics Institute, Freiberg University, Germany1974-75: The Theoretical Chemistry Institute at the Technical University in Munich, Germany1982-83: FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, Holland. Shorter stays were spent at Universities in Pisa, Bielefeld, Mexico, Uppsala, Paris and London. Taylor has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society since 1972. He received the USC Associates Award for Creative Scholarship and Research in 1974. He has been the recipient of 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. Taylor formally retired from USC in 2005.
Howard was an extremely imaginative theorist whose early inspiration came from pioneering electron scattering experimentalists such as George Schultz and Helmut Erhardt. They observed features in the cross section that suggested the presence of long-lived temporary anions. Howard's primary goal was to explain what these experimentalists were seeing in their detectors and he used “chemical intuition” and the methods of quantum chemistry to make progress. Taylor and his co-workers devised an approach, termed “Stabilization”, to explain these observations, and to predict new features, which were indeed found in later spectra. Some in the community were skeptical at the lack of rigor in his approach and were initially highly critical and took him to task. To his credit that he was not a person to be deterred or intimidated: he plowed ahead, with dramatic success, in spite of loud and vigorous criticism from many respected community members. This came especially from those who argued that the properties of resonant states, being in the continuous spectrum, had to follow from formal scattering theory. In the mid 1960’s such theory was in its infancy in chemical and atomic, molecular and optical physics, and computational techniques to compute such states non-existent for the complex molecular systems of interest to Howard and his experimental community. Quantum chemical electronic structure techniques, although also fairly new, did exist, and in Howard’s determined and facile mind and hands, were found sufficient to solve many outstanding problems. In the final analysis, the methodology was put on a firm theoretical basis and Howard was, theoretically as well as empirically, vindicated.
Howard’s interests then turned to many-body Green’s function methods, and to nonlinear dynamics and chaotic phenomena. Experimental spectroscopist Bob Field of MIT, comments on this latter interest as follows: Early in my career as a small-molecule spectroscopist I developed a technique that permitted me to record spectra of highly vibrationally excited acetylene. Initially, based on adjacent level spacing and intensity distributions, I claimed the spectra exhibited “quantum chaos” and were “intrinsically unassignable”. Howard taught me how to look, not at individual eigenstates, but at patterns. The members of these patterns were not single eigenstates. We called them “feature states” or, more prosaically, “clumps.” It is a big step for a high-resolution spectroscopist to attach significance to anything less than fully resolved and assigned eigenstates. But the payoff was enormous.
At the end of his career, Howard returned to ideas similar to those used he found so useful in “Stabilization”. Going against the grain of the larger community, Howard developed a signal processing method that when applied to the free induction decays of Lorentzian NMR systems yielded spectra with significantly greater sensitivity and resolution than the standard Fourier method of processing. This allowed the taking of 15N, 17O and13C (quaternary) NMR spectra without employing isotopic enrichment.
For those of us who were privileged to know Howard as a colleague and friend, he will be sorely missed. His brash exuberance, extra-ordinary imagination in finding simple solutions to complex problems, and over the top humor and sharp wit were defining personal traits. He was one of a kind.
Submitted by:
Barry I. Schneider (NIST, Applied and Computational Mathematics Division)
and
William P. Reinhardt (Emeritus Professor U. Washington, Seattle, Adjunct IPST, UMD, College Park.
Useful additional input by Professor Robert W. Field, Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, MIT.
