OKTAY SINANOGLU

1935 - 2015

SINANOGLU, OKTAY (1935-2015) Oktay Sinanoglu, a distinguished, internationally renowned Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, died on Sunday, April 19, 2015 at age 80. He was the youngest appointed full-time professor of the 20th century, as well as the third youngest full professor in Yale’s 300-plus year history. Known also as the “Turkish Einstein”, Sinanoglu’s greatest scientific contributions were a theory of the electronic structure of molecules, known as the Many Electron Theory of Atoms and Molecules; Solvophobic Theory; Network Theory; Microthermodynamics; and Valency Interaction Formula Theory. Methods to address this ‘election correlation’ problem are still being developed today. In 1995 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sinanoglu was born in Bari, Italy, on February 25, 1935 to Nuzhet Hasim and Ruveyde Karacabey Sinanoglu. His father was an official in the Turkish consulate there, and a writer. His mother was a journalist. The family returned to Turkey in July 1938. Sinanoglu came to the United States in 1953 to study at the University of California-Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. with highest honors in 1956. The following year (1957) he completed an M.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship. He completed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley, in 1959. Sinanoglu joined the Yale faculty in 1960, and was appointed Professor of Chemistry in 1963. Sinanoglu is survived by his wife, Dilek Sinanoglu and their twins. He is also survived by his first wife, Paula Armbruster of New Haven, CT, their children, son Karacabey Levni Sinanoglu, of New Haven, CT; daugher Elif Sinanoglu Armbruster of Arlington, Massachusetts; son Murat Alexander Armbruster of Oakland, California, and three grandchildren.