Scholars: Precocious Prof

At 18. Oktay Sinanoglu was a budding short story writer in his native Turkey. But then he decided that Turks needed science more than fiction and switched to chemistry. Between 1956 and 1959, Sinanoglu managed to graduate from the University of California with a Phi Beta Kappa key, get an M.S. at M.I.T. and a Ph.D. at Berkeley, and become a nuclear notable for his “many-electron theory of atoms and molecules.” Last week, 2½ years after joining the Yale faculty, where he teaches quantum chemistry to graduate students, Sinanoglu was named a full professor at the ripe young age of 28 years and three months.

Sinanoglu noses out by six weeks the 20th century Yale youth record held by Robert M. Hutchins, the boy wonder who became a full professor and acting dean of the law school in 1927. Sinanoglu’s nearest current rival is Guido Calabresi, another Yale law professor who got the nod last year; but he was then an aging 29. Gallingly enough, Sinanoglu is not the youngest full professor in Yale’s 262 years. The record belongs to Yale’s first chemistry professor. Benjamin Silliman, who got the job in 1802 at the age of 23.*Silliman, of course, did not waste his youth writing short stories.

—*Silliman was then a lawyer and knew nothing about chemistry, but on-the-job training eventually made him the top U.S. scientist in the first half of the 19th century.