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...

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