Edwin F. Taylor

June 22, 1931 - April 22, 2025

Edwin F. Taylor of Arlington, MA, a renowned physicist educator/author passed away on April 22, 2025, at the age of 93. Born on June 22, 1931, in Oberlin, Ohio, to Lloyd William Taylor, chairman of the Oberlin College physics department, and Esther Bliss Taylor, an active community leader, Edwin dedicated his life to physics education and making complex concepts accessible to students worldwide.

Taylor received his A.B. degree from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University where he studied under Nobel Laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen. Taylor spent most of his professional life at Wesleyan University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Taylor's Junior Faculty Sabbatical from Wesleyan University spent at Princeton led to collaboration with John Archibald Wheeler in writing the special relativity text Spacetime Physics, republished in two editions. Taylor and Wheeler later developed a first look at general relativity that employed calculus rather than tensors. At MIT, Taylor was part of the team under Jerrold Zacharias that worked on a new introductory undergraduate physics course. Part of his contribution was a collaboration on quantum mechanics with Leo Sartori and Arthur Kerman, and finally with co-author A. P. French with whom he published "An Introduction to Quantum Physics".

A member of AAPT since1957, Taylor was in the MIT Department of Physics for 25 years, eventually becoming a Senior Research Scientist. From 1973-78 he was Editor of the American Journal of Physics. In 1997 his service was recognized with the Homer L Dodge Citation for Outstanding Service to AAPT.

He served several years on the Steering Committee of the Introductory University Physics Project. He is co-author, with Paul Horwitz, of award winning computer software to help students learn special relativity. For years he taught physics subjects over the Internet in a series of courses offered by Montana State University. For 5 years he helped develop high school physics curricula at Boston University, after which he spent a year in the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington. He worked at the Center for Innovation in Learning at Carnegie Mellon University working on an improved and simplified introduction to quantum mechanics devised many years ago by Richard P. Feynman.

In 1998 Taylor received the Oersted Medal, the highest award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, for his "profound contributions to the pedagogy of relativity and quantum mechanics." He was also a pioneer in educational technology, developing innovative software to help students understand complex physics concepts and teaching one of the earliest online physics courses through Montana State University.

After retiring from MIT in 1991, Dr. Taylor continued his academic pursuits at Boston University and Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout his later years, he remained committed to making complex ideas accessible to learners worldwide, offering free downloads of his textbooks online and continuing to author and collaborate on essays, pamphlets, and sermons on a wide array of topics.

In 2014 Taylor was recognized as an AAPT Fellow.

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