Feza Gürsey

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Feza Gürsey (born April 7, 1921 in Istanbul , † April 13, 1992 in New Haven , Connecticut ) was a Turkish theoretical physicist . His most famous contribution to theoretical physics was the application of group theory in elementary particle physics.

Life

Gürsey's parents were Reşit Süreyya Gürsey and the chemist Remziye Hisar. He attended the prestigious Galatasaray Lisesi high school and studied mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Natural Sciences (tr. Fen Faculty) in Istanbul. He received his doctorate in 1950 from Imperial College in London under Harry Jones on the application of quaternions in quantum field theory . He then worked at Cambridge University before moving to Istanbul University. There he worked initially as an assistant, then from 1953 as a professor. He married his colleague Suha Pamir in 1952.

The years from 1957 to 1961 are considered to be his most productive. During this time he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory , the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Columbia University . In the sixties worked on nonlinear systems and published on topics of strong interaction.

In 1961 he returned to Turkey , where he accepted the title of professor at the Technical University of the Middle East (METU) and took on an important role in the establishment of the department of theoretical physics, which was headed by Erdal Inönü . He continued his work as a lecturer at this institute until 1974. In the early 1960s, however, he was alternating between Ankara and the USA, for example at Yale University . In 1965 he was offered a position at Yale University. He accepted the offer in 1968 and worked there until his retirement in 1991. From 1977 he held the Gibbs chair there. In 1992 he died of prostate cancer. In 1972 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

Gürsey was internationally recognized as an authority on group theory applications in physics (especially elementary particle physics). He became particularly well known in the 1960s through the expansion of the SU (3) symmetry of the elementary particles to an SU (6) symmetry (including the spin), introduced with Luigi Radicati in 1964 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory . Later he played an important role in the formulation of E6 theories and GUT 's with other exceptional Lie groups such as E 7, E8. Gürsey was also considered an expert in the application of quaternions and octonions in physics.

In honor of Gürsey, the Feza Gürsey Institute was established as a joint establishment of the Bosporus University and TÜBİTAK . In July 2011 the institute was converted from an institute for theoretical physics into an institute for applied mathematics and subordinated to the Center for Computer Science and Information Security (Bilgem). That led to protests. The name should be retained.

Gürsey is considered the most important physicist in Turkey.

Awards

Fonts

  • with Chia-Hsiung Tze: On the role of Division, Jordan and related Algebras in Particle Physics, World Scientific 1996

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Feza Gürsey in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ↑ Obituary at CERN, pdf
  3. ↑ Memories of Ron Shaw
  4. ^ Gürsey, Radicati, Spin and Unitary Spin Independence of Strong Interactions. Physical Review Letters, Volume 13, 1964, pp. 173-175
  5. ↑ Gürsey, Pais, Radicati, Spin and Unitary Spin Independence of Strong Interactions, Physical Review Letters, Volume 13, 1964, pp. 299-301
  6. ^ Blog on the preservation of the Gürsey Institute
personal data
SURNAME Gürsey, Feza
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Istanbul
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 1992
Place of death New Haven