Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor OM FRS FRSE (7 March 1886 – 27 June 1975) was a British physicist and mathematician, who made contributions to fluid dynamics and wave theory.

[3] As a child he was fascinated by science after attending the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and performed experiments using paint rollers and sticky-tape.

Once it became widely accepted in around 1927 that the electromagnetic field was quantized, Taylor's experiment began to be presented in pedagogical treatments as evidence that interference effects with light cannot be interpreted in terms of one photon interfering with another photon—that, in fact, a single photon's probability amplitudes do interfere by going through both slits of a double-slit apparatus.

[9] In 1913 Taylor served as a meteorologist aboard the Ice Patrol vessel Scotia, where his observations formed the basis of his later work on a theoretical model of mixing of the air.

He also produced another major contribution to turbulent flow, where he introduced a new approach through a statistical study of velocity fluctuations.

[4] In 1934, Taylor, roughly contemporaneously with Michael Polanyi and Egon Orowan, realised that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations developed by Vito Volterra in 1905.

At Los Alamos, Taylor helped solve implosion instability problems in the development of atomic weapons, particularly the plutonium bomb used at Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

By coincidence, Joan Hinton, another direct descendant of the mathematician George Boole, had been working on the same project and witnessed the event in an unofficial capacity.

Joan, strongly opposed to nuclear weapons, defected to Mao's China, while Taylor maintained that political policy was not within the remit of the scientist.

Though he officially retired in 1952, he continued research for the next twenty years, concentrating on problems that could be attacked using simple equipment.

[11][19] His other late work included the longitudinal dispersion in flow in tubes,[11][20] movement through porous surfaces, and the dynamics of thin sheets of liquids.

In 1972 D. H. MIchael read Taylor's paper, on making holes in a thin sheet of liquid, at the 13th International Conferences for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Moscow.

In the 1930s he invented the 'CQR' anchor, which was both stronger and more manageable than any in use, and which was used for all sorts of small craft including seaplanes.