Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. is an astrophysicist who discovered the first binary pulsar --two extremely dense, collapsed stars in orbit around each other. He made this discovery in 1974 with Russell A. Hulse , who was then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. The two men used this binary pulsar to verify aspects of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which scientists had not yet had an opportunity to test. Binary pulsars became what Taylor and Hulse describe in Astrophysical Journal Letters as "a nearly ideal relativity laboratory," and they have made particularly important contributions to the understanding of gravity. For their discovery of the binary pulsar and the application of their findings to the theory of relativity, Taylor and Hulse were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics.

Taylor was born in Philadelphia on March 29, 1941, the son of Joseph and Sylvia Evans Taylor. In 1959, Taylor entered Haverford College...