Alan Breach Tayler

Alan Breach Tayler, CBE, Director of the Oxford Centre for Industrialand Applied Mathematics, died on 28 January 1995, aged 63. Alan went up to Oxford in 1951 to read Mathematics at BrasenoseCollege. He obtained a first, and after a brief excursion tothe Bristol Aircraft Company, he returned to work for a DPhilwith George Temple. His thesis, completed in 1959 and entitled‘Problems in compressible flow’, contained a mixtureof analytic, approximate and numerical solutions which foreshadowedthe new practical applied mathematics that he embraced later.He became University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow of St Catherine'sSociety in 1959. During the next twenty-five years, Alan Tayler brought a newethos to applied mathematics. This change came about throughhis recognition that the status quo in the 1960s, which compriseda delicate balance between theory and practice in the area ofapplied mechanics, was capable of far-reaching generalisation;indeed, he saw that such a development was essential since thefollowing decades were to be dominated by computers and an ever-increasingneed for mathematical modelling. In 1967, with Leslie Fox, heinitiated the mathematical Study Groups with Industry, whereinacademic and industrial researchers interact in week-long workshops.These were an immediate success: (1) with industry, who foundnew insights into their problems and new recruiting possibilities;(2) with students, whose enthusiasm to use their theoreticalknowledge soon led to the highly popular MSc in MathematicalModelling and Numerical Analysis; and (3) with faculty, bothpure and applied, who found an undreamed of source of fascinatingnew theoretical problems. For example, one intellectual consequencewas the use of industrial case studies to uncover the new fieldof ‘free boundary problems’, on which several thousandlearned articles have appeared since 1970.