Oktay Sinanoğlu, a champion of the Turkish language and a lover of his country and nation, passed away on April 19, 2015. We pray for God's mercy upon Oktay Sinanoğlu and offer our condolences to all his loved ones.
Who is Oktay Sinanoğlu?
He was born in Bari, where his father (Nüzhet Haşim Sinanoğlu) was working at the Turkish Consulate General. Following the outbreak of World War II in Italy in 1939, he returned to Türkiye with his family.
Oktay Sinanoğlu entered Ankara Yenişehir High School, which later became TED College, as a scholarship student and graduated first in his class in 1953. He then went to the United States on a scholarship to study Chemical Engineering. In 1956, he graduated first in his class from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in Chemical Engineering.
In 1957, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in eight months with a degree in chemical engineering, receiving the Alfred Sloan Award. In 1959, he completed his PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1960, he became an assistant professor at Yale University.
In 1960-1961, he became an "Associate Professor" with his work on the many-electron theory of atoms and molecules. In 1963, at the age of 28, he earned the title of "Full Professor" by contributing a mathematical theory that had remained unsolved for 50 years to the scientific world. He is the youngest faculty member to achieve this title at Yale University in the 20th century.
In 1962, the Board of Trustees of the Middle East Technical University bestowed upon Oktay Sinanoğlu the unique title of Consulting Professor. He was also appointed professor to a second chair at Yale University. In 1973, he became the first recipient of Germany's highest "Alexander von Humboldt Science Prize." In 1975, he won Japan's "International Distinguished Scientist Award"; also in 1975, by special law, Oktay Sinanoğlu was granted the first and only title of Professor of the Republic of Turkey. In 1976, he was sent to Japan as a Special Envoy of the Republic of Turkey. He laid the foundations for Turkish-Japanese cultural, scientific, and educational relations. He is the first and only Turkish member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the prestigious "Elena Moshinsky" Science Prize by the Mexican government.
He became one of the first professors in the newly emerging field of molecular biology. He provided an explanation for how the DNA helix remains in that form in solution. He gave lectures about his discoveries and theories in many parts of the world.
In the 1980s, he focused his work on a theoretical framework for teaching chemistry in a simplified way. However, his work published in 1988 did not receive much attention in the academic world. In 1993, he retired from his professorship at Yale University at a relatively young age. That same year, he returned to Türkiye and was appointed professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Faculty of Science and Letters, Yıldız Technical University. He retired from this position in 2002.
During his time in Türkiye, he dedicated his work primarily to spreading his nationalist views on Turkish national identity and the Turkish language. He advocated for the official language to be the language of instruction and for foreign languages to be taught as supplementary subjects. He also stated that Turkish, due to its mathematical structure, is the best language for science.
He was a scientist who made many contributions to quantum mechanics throughout his life. He solved a problem in quantum mechanics, namely the topology of Hilbert space and the high symmetries it contains, a problem that PAM Dirac had also worked on but could not solve. Thus, he placed the science of chemistry on a solid foundation with this topological investigation.
