NORWICH — Ed Taylor rarely turned down a blueberry muffin. Wouldn’t pass up an eclair, or anything chocolate, and he happily tucked into apple crisp. He relied on his morning latte, drunk out of a favorite blue mug and hot almost to the point of being intolerable. But he had a special affection and appetite for pie – apple, blueberry, cherry or minced meat.
If one pie dominated, it was pumpkin, which Taylor favored for breakfast, although he invariably fed the crust to the family dog.
Pumpkin pie-for-breakfast was a frequent but not daily habit. But, once Taylor was diagnosed in 2022 with Lewy Body Dementia, a progressive disease that strips people of brain and body function, his wife Petra Bonfert-Taylor decided that Taylor should be able to eat one of his favorite foods every day. Once a week, she baked a pumpkin pie that she divided into seven pieces, one for each day of the week.
Edward Clayton Taylor died on March 10, 2025 at 63 in the family home in Norwich. He is survived by his two children, Alexander and Elaine, his younger brother Robert and other family members, and his wife, a professor of engineering and an associate dean for Diversity and Inclusion at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.
As a mathematician, professor, and later a program officer at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., Taylor “wrote or co-authored 24 research papers in mathematics,” said his friend and colleague Richard Canary, a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, where Taylor was a postdoc. Over his career, Taylor made important contributions to such mathematical fields as complex analysis, dynamics, geometry and topology, Canary said.
The University of Michigan also happened to be the place where, in 1996, Taylor, who had earned a bachelor’s of science from Brown University and a doctorate from SUNY Stony Brook, met Petra Bonfert, a mathematics postdoc from Germany who was in the U.S. for the first time.
In an introductory session on Bonfert’s first day at Michigan, postdocs were told to introduce themselves to each other. Taylor turned to Bonfert. “Hi, I’m Ed Taylor,” he told her.
Within a month, they were a couple; and they married in 1997.
“He basically explained the U.S. to me culturally. Even though you would think it’s not that different, it’s different enough, right?” Bonfert-Taylor said.
Her husband was a person of deep interests, passions and habits. Animal husbandry, soil science, geology, beekeeping, skiing, golfing trips with a posse of friends, farm equipment, walking the dog, hiking, the alt-rock now-defunct satellite radio channel SiriusXM FredOn44, the novels of Larry McMurtry, and University of Michigan football. He was addicted to the PBS science show Nova, which he watched with his daughter, Lainey. He loved The Simpsons and Seinfeld, and saw in the Seinfeld character George Costanza’s self-deprecations echoes of his own humor, his daughter said. (Despite the association, Lainey was not named for the Seinfield character Elaine Benes.)
When Taylor really loved something, he zeroed in on it.
“If he heard a song that he liked, then he would ask us to play it again, and play it again, and play it again,” Lainey Taylor said. Once, Ed made his kids listen repeatedly to Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets” from their house to the Dartmouth Skiway, a journey of approximately 35 minutes.
Taylor was animated and excitable, always interested in an exchange of ideas and opinions about whatever was in the air, said family friend Karen Lunny Seltzer, who recalls him looking like a Vermont version of Albert Einstein, with disheveled hair sticking up from his scalp, hands running through his hair, an old flannel shirt and baggy Carhartt pants.
Taylor was “generous and very caring,” said Brenda Petrella, a neighbor and friend. “He had a quirky sense of humor. He would make these jokes that not everyone would get, and then he’d laugh at his own jokes. He was a warm, kind, gentle person but he couldn’t always express it very well.”
Taylor grew up with his younger brother Rob on a farm in Bolton, Mass. His parents Edward and Virginia Taylor were both scientists: his father was a chemist at the Environmental Protection Agency and his mother was a college mathematics professor. As a side venture, the family kept dairy cows, said Rob Taylor, a banker who lives in Connecticut.
“My brother was in charge of the equipment and hay operations; I was in charge of the cows,” Rob Taylor said. The farming life, with all its trials and pleasures, and its bond with animals, meant a great deal to his brother, even when his pursuit of it bordered on impetuous, Taylor said.
After leaving Michigan, both Bonfert-Taylor and her husband got tenure at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The Upper Valley became familiar to them because they’d driven through it. When it came time to introduce their children to skiing, Taylor advocated for bringing them to the Dartmouth Skiway for lessons. Rising anywhere between 4 and 6 a.m. in Connecticut to make an early morning lesson in New Hampshire became common practice.
Such demands “might seem unreasonable, and they probably were unreasonable. But I feel what was unique about him was that maybe he couldn’t see that they were unreasonable, and so he did them,” said his daughter Lainie in a phone interview from California, where she is a graduate student in physics.
“Ed was a guy who had big dreams. He always had a big project going on,” Canary said.
In 2012, Taylor and his wife bought a heavily wooded lot in a can’t-get-there-from here corner of Norwich with the idea that they would eventually move there full time and find jobs, and their two children would enroll in local schools. Taylor wanted to devote some of his formidable energy to clearing the land, turning it into viable pasture, and investing in chickens and cows while continuing to work in the mathematics field.
“Most people declared us entirely insane. But if we find ourselves in a situation that we like better, why would we let tenure tie us down like that?” said Bonfert-Taylor, who began working at Dartmouth in 2015.
In 2013, Taylor took on a full-time job at the National Science Foundation, which meant arduous weekly commuting by plane to Washington. It was utterly exhausting for everyone in the family, with the two children in the Dresden school system, Bonfert-Taylor’s teaching job and, not least, Taylor himself, Bonfert-Taylor said.
But, Canary said, “I think he liked the fact that it was a service to the community.” In fact, Canary added, Taylor’s “experience as a prominent research mathematician made him successful as a program officer.”
On the home front, Taylor was part of a group of neighbors who helped rescue a starving stray cow, origin unknown, that was wandering the woods near their houses in 2017, said Petrella. Once Petrella safely secured the stray, which later gave birth to a calf, Taylor was, she said, “phenomenal in helping me to learn how to care for these two rescue cows.”
But then Taylor acquired some Scottish Highland cattle, to his family’s dismay. These were not cuddly calves that would mature into docile dairy cows, but horned, not particularly friendly behemoths that patrolled the property and came close enough to stare into the house at the humans. As Taylor’s disease progressed, he could no longer care for them, and Bonfert-Taylor lobbied to sell them.
“It took a long time to convince him that I needed to do that. They were very important to him. And he had a hard time admitting to himself that he was sick,” she said.
Taylor did his best to conceal his condition. “He didn’t want to complain or let people know he was sick. That’s a little bit of who he was,” said Rob Taylor.
But the struggle of being unable to express himself was grueling, said Bonfert-Taylor. “He couldn’t get the words out. And then he also couldn’t get the math straight anymore. And that was so difficult for him that his bread and butter was taken from him.”
As he weakened, he would often lie down with Cannon, the family dog with a dignified mien that accompanied Taylor on his walks. “He would get on the couch with Cannon. And just the animal warmth of it was, I think, very good for him,” Canary said.
“I obviously saw a very different side of him when he was sick,” Lainey Taylor said. There were personality changes. “But, to me, I still saw him as the same person-very loving, very goofy. A very curious type of person.”
Petrella said that once every few months, when he was in better health, Taylor would come around to her house, where they’d sit on the porch and swap cow and kid stories. “He was really proud of his kids, I know that. He’d talk very highly about his kids.”
“The kids were always part of everything that was very important to him,” Bonfert-Taylor said.
On one of her last visits home before her father’s death, Lainey decided to go for a run. For safety reasons, she asked her father to stay at home rather than try to accompany her. When she returned to their road, she saw him walking Cannon on a leash. He’d put socks on his hands that were, she said, “supposed to be makeshift mittens.”
When she asked him why he had come outside, he said he was concerned about her, and wanted to make sure she was OK. “It was very sweet, and that’s just who he was. And then we went on a nice little walk together,” she said.
This past summer, when family and friends held a Celebration of Life for Ed Taylor at his home away from home, the Dartmouth Skiway, the only desserts on hand were pies.