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Feza Gürsey

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File:FezaGursey.jpg
Feza Gürsey.

Feza Gürsey (April 7, 1921 - April 13, 1992) was a Turkish mathematician and physicist.

His best known contribution to theoretical physics is his work on the Nonlinear Chiral Lagrangian.

Biography

Feza Gürsey was born on April 21, 1921 in Istanbul, to Reşit Süreyya Gürsey, a military physician, and Remziye Hisar, a chemist and a pioneer female Turkish scientists. He graduated from Galatasaray Lisesi in 1940, and received his degree in Mathematics – Physics from Istanbul Fen Fakultesi in 1944.

Through a scholarship of the Turkish Ministry of Education he received while he was an assistant in Istanbul University, he pursued a doctorate degree at the Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. He completed his work on Application of Quaternions to Quantum Field Theory in 1950. After spending the period from 1950 – 1951 in postdoctoral research at Cambridge University, he worked as an assistant at Istanbul University, where he married Suha Pamir, also a physics assistant, in 1952 and acquired the title of Associate Professor in 1953.

File:Bromley d allan e1.jpg
Faculty of the Yale Physics Department during the time of Feza Gürsey. Left to right: Kraybill, Gürsey, Bromley, Sandweiss, Bardeen, Lichten, Adair, Schultz, Greenberg, MacDowell, Sommerfield, Lamb, Parker, Bockelman.

The period of 1957 – 1961 is considered his most productive, during which he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, and Columbia University. During this period, he established close relations with prominent figures like Wolfgang Pauli, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Eugene Paul Wigner, T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang. In 1960s, he worked on the Nonlinear Chiral Lagrangian, and produced results of relevance to Quantum Chromodynamics.


Returning to Turkey in 1961, he accepted the title of Professor from Middle East Technical University (METU) and undertook a significant duty in the establishment of METU Department of Theoretical Physics. Continuing his work as a lecturer at METU until 1974, he instructed a great many of students and formed a valuable research group.

Being offered a position at Yale University in 1965, he started to work in both Yale University and METU, until 1974, when he decided to give up his position in METU and settle in the United States to continue with Yale. During these years, he played a pivotal role in the formulation of E(6) grand unified theories.

Gürsey died in 1992, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Awards

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