Feza Gürsey

Feza Gürsey (1921–1992) was a Turkish theoretical physicist, known for the chiral model, for work on the SU(6) symmetry of elementary particles, and for the Gürsey–Radicati mass formula. He founded the theoretical physics department at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and later held the Gibbs chair at Yale University. He received the Oppenheimer Prize in 1977 and the Wigner Medal in 1986, and the Feza Gürsey Institute in Istanbul bears his name. ¹

He was born on 7 April 1921 in Anadolu Hisarı, Istanbul, into a family of science: his mother, Remziye Hisar, was a pioneering Turkish chemist, and his father, Reşit Süreyya Gürsey, was a medical doctor and physicist. He graduated from Galatasaray High School in 1940 and from Istanbul University in 1944, and took his PhD at Imperial College London in 1950, under Harry Jones. ^{1 2}

He was appointed at Istanbul University in 1951 — the Turkish article notes that the appointment was made with Cahit Arf's support — and spent 1957–61 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Institute for Advanced Study and Columbia University. In 1961 he became a professor at the Middle East Technical University, where he founded its theoretical physics department, and from 1965 he also taught at Yale, taking a permanent post there in 1974 as Gibbs Professor of Physics; he became emeritus in 1991. His work ranged over the chiral model of particle interactions, the SU(6) symmetry, the Gürsey–Radicati formula, and the exceptional group E6 as a candidate grand-unification symmetry. ^{1 2}

He died on 13 April 1992 in New Haven, Connecticut, and was buried in the family plot at Anadolu Hisarı Cemetery in Istanbul. The Feza Gürsey Institute, founded in Istanbul for research in theoretical physics and mathematics, carries his name. ^{1 2}

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