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Nobel Laureate Richard Taylor dies at 88

Feb 24, 2018 | 7:30 AM

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA — A Nobel-prize winning physicist with ties to Medicine Hat has passed away.

Richard Edward Taylor, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1990, passed away on Thursday in Stanford California at the age of 88.

At the time of his death, Taylor was a professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, according to an obituary on the University’s website. 

Taylor was born Nov. 2, 1929 in Medicine Hat, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at the University of Alberta in 1950 and 1952, respectively. He joined Stanford University in 1952 to earn his doctorate, which he accomplished in 1962. During his time at Stanford, he helped establish the Accelerator laboratory, and conducted research and experiments at the university.

In 1990, Taylor, along with Jerome I. Friedman and Henry W. Kendall of MIT, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics. The prize citation says the work was awarded “for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.”

In 2005, Taylor was also named a Companion of the Order of Canada for his lifetime of work.