Joseph H. Taylor was born in Philadelphia on March 29, 1941. In 1959, Taylor entered Haverford College where he majored in physics. He graduated in 1963 with a B.A. degree and entered the doctoral program in astronomy at Harvard University. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1968 and spent the next year as a research fellow and lecturer in astronomy at Harvard. In 1969 he joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In the fall of 1980, Taylor left Massachusetts to become professor of physics at Princeton University.

While at the University of Massachusetts in 1970, Taylor was approached by one of his graduate students, Russell Hulse, in search of a thesis project. The pair agreed on an undertaking involving the use of the 327-yard (300-m) diameter Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, the world's largest single-element radio telescope, to search the skies for the weak radio signals emitted by pulsars. Pulsars...