Feza Gürsey
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
Gürseys parents were Resit Süreyya Gürsey and the chemist Remziye Hisar. He attended the prestigious Galatasaray Lisesi high school and studied mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Science (tr. Fen Fakultesi ) in Istanbul. He received his doctorate in 1950 at Imperial College in London on the application of quaternions in quantum field theory. He then worked at Cambridge University before joining the University of Istanbul. There he worked first as an assistant, then from 1953 as a professor. He married in 1952 his colleague Suha Pamir.
The years 1957-1961 are considered to be his most productive. During this time he worked in at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Columbia University. In the sixties, worked on nonlinear systems and has published on topics of strong interactions.
In 1961 he returned to Turkey, where he assumed the title of Professor of Technical University of the Middle East ( METU ) and took an important task in the establishment of the Department of Theoretical Physics, which was led by Erdal Inonu. His work as a lecturer at this institution he continued until 1974. Back in the early 1960s but he was alternately in Ankara and in the U.S., 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. Starting in 1977, he had there the Gibbs Chair. In 1992, he died of prostate cancer.
Gürsey was internationally recognized as an authority for group theory applications in physics (especially the physics ). Particularly well known he was in the 1960s by the expansion of the SU (3) symmetry of elementary particles to a SU ( 6) symmetry ( involving the spins), introduced by Luigi Radicati 1964 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Later, he played an important role in the formulation of theories and E6 GUT 's with other exceptional Lie groups as E 7, E8. Gürsey was also regarded as an expert in the application of quaternions and octonions in physics.
Gürsey in honor of the Feza - Gürsey Institute was established as a joint creation of the Bosphorus University and TÜBİTAK. In July 2011, the institute was transformed from a Institute for Theoretical Physics in an Institute of Applied Mathematics and the Center for computer science and information security ( Bilgem ) subordinate. This led to protests. However, the name is to be retained.
Gürsey is considered the most important physicists of Turkey.