Mathematician Martin Taylor awarded knighthood

January 1, 2009 Pure mathematics professor and Vice President of the Royal Society Martin Taylor is among the scientists honoured in the British New Years Honours List. Professor Taylor, who becomes a Knight Bachelor for services to science, headed the SCORE group, which consisted of science teachers who advised the government on how to boost school pupils' interest in the sciences.

Taylor is known in mathematics for his work on the properties and structures of algebraic numbers. In particular he proved in 1981 the Fröhlich Conjecture. Albrecht Fröhlich was his PhD supervisor at King's College London. The conjecture relates the symmetries of algebraic integers to the behaviour of certain analytic functions called Artin L-functions.

At the young age of 33 he was appointed to a chair in pure mathematics at UMIST and continued in this position until the merger with the Victoria University of Manchester in 2004 when he became a professor in the School of Mathematics of the newly formed  University of Manchester.

Taylor has received numerous honours including the London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize in 1982 and shared the Adams Prize in 1983. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996. He was President of the London Mathematical Society from 1998 to 2000. In 2003 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Merit award and he became Chairman of the International Review of Mathematics (Steering group). In 2004 he was appointed Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society and in 2006 he awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Leicester, the university in the town of his birth.