It is with great regret that we have to report the passing on 1 February 2006 of Professor Roger Taylor, one of the pioneers of fullerene chemistry and a research collaborator and good friend of many workers in our field. His research for many years dealt with mechanistic studies of gas-phase thermal eliminations and of electrophilic aromatic substitutions, a topic on which he wrote an influential book. With the discovery of C₆₀ and of the other fullerenes, his research, like that of so many of us, entered an exciting new phase. It was Roger's expertise in chromatography that enabled him to become the first person to obtain pure samples of C₆₀ and C₇₀ and hence to make a decisive contribution to the Sussex group's 'one-line proof' of the structure of C₆₀ in the now-classic 1990 paper on 'Isolation, Separation, and Characterisation of the Fullerenes C₆₀ and C₇₀: The Third Form of Carbon' [R. Taylor, J.P. Hare, A.K. Abdul-Sada, H.W. Kroto, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Commun. (1990) 1423]. Roger was a prolific lecturer, highly cited author and enthusiastic collaborator, who worked with colleagues across the world both on basic research and, through his teaching, editing, refereeing, conference organisation and work for IUPAC committees, on maintaining and promoting the subject of chemistry. His books on Fullerene Chemistry (1995 and 1999) are important sources of basic information in this field, which will be quarried by theoreticians and experimentalists alike for years to come.

This thematic issue is dedicated to the memory of Roger Taylor.