COURTESY OF JUSTIN WILSON
Turkish chemist and Yale Professor Emeritus Oktay Sinanoglu died last month (April 19) after hospitalization for a coma. He was 80.
Born as the son of a diplomat in Bari, Italy, in 1935, Sinanoglu grew up in Turkey and moved to the United States in 1953. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956, before earning a master’s degree from MIT the following year and returning to Berkeley to complete a PhD in theoretical chemistry in 1959.
In 1960, he was appointed an assistant professor at Yale and promoted to associate professor the following year for his work on the many-electron theory of atoms and molecules. In 1963, at the age of 28, Sinanoglu earned ...
