Taylor earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1956, under the supervision of Richard J. Eden and Abdus Salam.
His contributions include: the discovery (also made independently by Lev Landau) of singularities in the analytical structure of the Feynman integrals for processes in quantum field theory, the PCAC nature of radioactive decay of the pion and the discovery in 1971 of the so-called Slavnov–Taylor identities, which control symmetry and renormalisation of gauge theories.
In addition, they contributed to the resummation programme in thermal QCD, simplifying the "hard" part of the effective action.
Later, they studied complications arising from the non-polynomial nature of the QCD Hamiltonian in the (unitary) Coulomb gauge.
[6] His certificate of election reads: Distinguished for his contributions to the Quantum Theory of Fields and the Physics of Elementary Particles.