Martin John Taylor (born 18 February 1952) is a British mathematician and academic. He was Professor of Pure Mathematics at the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester and, prior to its formation and merger, UMIST where he was appointed to a chair after moving from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1986. He was elected Warden of Merton College, Oxford on 5 November 2009, took office on 2 October 2010 and retired in September 2018.
Taylor was born in Leicester in 1952 and educated at Wyggeston Grammar School. He gained a first class degree from the University of Oxford where he was a student of Pembroke College, Oxford in 1973, and a PhD from King's College London with a thesis on Galois representations in 1976 supervised by Albrecht Fröhlich.
Taylor's early research investigated various properties and structures of algebraic numbers. In 1981 he proved the Fröhlich conjecture relating the symmetries of algebraic integers to the behaviour of certain analytic functions called Artin L-functions. More recently his research has led him to study various aspects of arithmetic geometry: in particular, he and his collaborators have demonstrated how geometric properties of zeros of integral polynomials in many variables can be determined by the behaviour of associated L-functions.
Taylor was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 1982 and shared the Adams Prize in 1983. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1996. He was President of the London Mathematical Society from 1998 to 2000 and in 2004 was appointed Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society. Taylor was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 2009 New Year Honours. Taylor received an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of East Anglia in July 2012.
Taylor's hobbies include fly fishing and hill walking, and he is a supporter of Manchester United F.C.. He married Sharon Lynn Marlow in 1973 and has four children.