In memory of John G. Taylor: a polymath scholar

The scope of this special issue is to celebrate the work of the late Professor John Taylor. John began his career in 1956 as a theoretical physicist and has contributed many seminal papers and books to high-energy physics, black holes, quantum gravity and string theory. He held positions in leading Universities in the UK, USA and Europe in physics and mathematics. He created the Centre for Neural Networks at King’s College, London, in 1990 and served as its Director till the day he died. He was appointed Emeritus Professor of Mathematics of London University in 1996 after having spent 25 years there as a Professor of Mathematics. He was Guest Scientist at the Research Centre in Juelich, Germany, from 1996 till 1998, working on analysis of brain images. He has acted as consultant in Neural Networks to several companies. Till his death, he was the Director of Research on Global Bond products and Tactical Asset Allocation for a financial investment company involved in time series prediction. He was the European Editor-in-Chief of the Neural Networks journal and acted as President of the International Neural Network Society in 1995 and the European Neural Network Society in 1993–1994. Since 2009, he was the founding Chair of the Advisory Editorial Board for the Cognitive Computation journal