Anecdotes from my years at Yale 1961-65

My early arrival started with a bang when I first walked into the building. A girl named Judy, as I quickly learned, came running over to me saying, "Marc, Marc, what are you doing here?" I was confused as my name was not Marc. "Marc Estrin, I thought you were still in New York!" Now this was getting interesting. I wasn't Marc Estrin but Marc Estrin was a classmate and friend from Queens College which I had graduated from a year earlier. No one had ever confused me with Marc before. After some erratic confusion, I established to Judy's satisfaction, that I was not Marc BUT Marc and Judy and my wife, Libby, and I had probably all been dragged to some classical music concert by Marc and had probably all sat together in the audience two years earlier.

Later on, I got to pondering the amazing statistical improbability of this event. At a university where we had never crossed paths before, Judy found someone who she thought looked like a friend. Not so amazing there, unless you imagine that I was the only person who would have reminded Judy of Marc, and that we somehow ended up in the same place on the same day which sounds like one in a hundred thousand. Pretty rare! But the further notion that the one person Judy picked out would actually know Marc – now we are talking about one in millions.

I don't recall that I ever met Judy again. I don't think she was, or remained a chemistry student, at Yale. Marc didn't recall who she was, when I told him about the event fifty years later.

I got to Yale on the coattails of Dr. Stephen Berry, a wonderfully imaginative and brilliant physical chemist whom I started working with when we were both at Univ. of Michigan. When he moved to Yale, I followed him.

I got to meet some characters at Yale. Two whom I especially recall were Okay Sinanoğlu and Lars Onsager, an ethnic Turk and an ethnic Norwegian.

Onsager was about 6 foot 4 inches tall and so stood out in any group. I interacted with him only once when it was announced that he would be giving a lecture on irreversible thermodynamics, his specialty.

I can say I had the misfortune to attend that lecture, as did almost everyone from the department. It was confusing, impossible to follow and impossible to read his symbols on the board. I would not want to criticize the level of his teaching had it not been repeatedly referred to in his Wikipedia article, and so could be considered public knowledge.

I could not tell the difference, on the blackboard, between a 2, an "s," a ν (Greek nu), a "v," etc. I wasted some time asking a few times and then gave up. He did not improve on his writing following questions.

I was told that he made a habit of falling asleep during PhD oral exams but at the end, woke up and asked a cogent question. I had the strong impression that his social skills were deficient to say the least and that he had few friends. This was to prove extremely significant for my story.

A story was told to me about Onsager which I accepted and believed for 50 years, retelling it occasionally. I was told that the department suddenly discovered something embarrassing about him. It seemed that Onsager had never actually received a doctorate which broke the Yale policy that every professor needed to have one.

John Kirkwood, the acting Dept. Chairman, went to Onsager somewhat shamefaced to resolve the problem. "Lars," he began, "we have discovered that you don't have a PhD and you really should have one. Do you have some paper that you are perhaps working on that we could publish and call that your thesis?" "Then we could award you a PhD for that."

Onsager looked through papers in his desk and in boxes and suddenly discovered one on irreversible thermodynamics. "Here's one," he told Kirkwood, who then seized on the paper with gratitude and processed it as Onsager's thesis. A few years after publication, that paper won Onsager a Nobel Prize.

According to the Wikipedia article on Lars Onsager, the story was mostly true, though it actually happened in 1935 before Lars was appointed assistant professor. And it was on a mathematical solution that no one in the Chemistry dept. could comprehend. The Nobel Prize came much later, in 1968. It's a good story though, even though it was postdated to a contemporary one in the sixties. I'm sticking to it.

Sinanoğlu (the ğ is silent, not a hard g) had had a fairly stellar scholastic career, graduating at the top of his graduate class from UC Berkeley before getting an assistant professor posting at Yale.

Sinanoğlu was about as far from Onsager as it's possible to get, socially speaking. He was an active aspirant for career climbing, a glad hander, a canny science politician who was determined to climb the career ladder. Onsager, with his lack of friends, could not have been more suitable for his needs. Sinanoğlu snuggled up to Onsager as his mentor. Onsager was the doyen of the department and a few praise words from him could catapult Sinanoğlu into career stratosphere.

At the same time, Sinanoğlu had developed a simple multi-electron theory for solving more complex atoms than helium. He had a graduate group of about a dozen students every one of whom was working on applying his theory to a different atom or molecule.

This work led to a bunch of published papers with Sinanoğlu's name on them. Then Sinanoğlu published his own and his student's papers over and over in multiple journals, summations and overviews. Then Sinanoğlu organized conferences in Turkey and Europe where the same theory was applied liberally.

A book pulled together the various atoms that it had been applied to. In short, Sinanoğlu milked his theory for publications shamefully. But together with Onsager's good words, it paid off handsomely. In 1963, at the age of 28, he was appointed a full professor, the youngest Yale professor in hundreds of years.

When I was nearing my exit from Yale with a newly burnished PhD, I was looking for a posting where I could indulge my love of folk dancing, especially Bulgarian dances. So I looked in Bulgaria for a post doc. None were available, though there was one in Czechoslovakia.

I almost settled on that one but Sinanoğlu, who had done some Turkish folk dancing himself, stopped me. "Why would you want to go to a sterile, communist, Stalinist country like Bulgaria?" he opined, "Why don't you go to Turkey? You will have a much better time." I was incapable of assessing the truth of this since I had never thought about Turkey as a destination, nor did I know anything about Turkish folk dances.

"But I've never even contacted anyone in Turkey" I replied. "No problem," he replied. He picked up a phone, called the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and ten minutes later I had a posting at that University in the Chemistry Dept. teaching next year.

Sinanoğlu was thought of, in Turkey, as a Turkish Einstein. Such respect was golden. A few years later, I saw an article in a Turkish newspaper where he was in fact referred to as the Turkish Einstein.

I myself probably earned some respect from Oktay because of an incident that had taken place during my stay at Yale. He volunteered to give a lecture to the department on a problem that had been solved by Einstein himself.

It involved finding the physical-electronic mechanism by which the conductance of substances could vary by a factor of ten to the twentieth. When such huge variations are encountered, it suggests that something very special must be taking place. So the department convened in a classroom with all of Oktay's students present and Oktay took off running.

He presented the problem and the type of solution that would be attempted. He sprinkled the blackboard with equations and explanations. His students sitting in front of me were scribbling notes galore. I wrote as was my wont. I just listened and thought and tried to absorb the argument. I wasn't happy. I didn't believe the explanation.

When Oktay finished, he wrote QED at the bottom (Demonstrated Without Error) and turned to some applause. Then he threw open the floor to questions. I debated with myself whether I wanted to step into a lion's den and then threw up my hand.

When Oktay called on me, I told him that I didn't buy the argument. In fact, said incautious me, I thought that he had proved the exact opposite of what he claimed to have proven. Sinanoğlu's face fell and he turned and looked at the board. He deserves undying credit for what followed.

He strode up and down for five minutes saying nothing. Then he turned to me and delivered the magic words; "You're right!" and excused the class. The next day he was scheduled to explain his theory to my Quantum Mechanics class with my own mentor, Steven Berry. He came in, saw me in the front room, and whispered; "Remember, no questions."

In due course, I left Yale under strictures connected with Steve Berry having accepted a post at the University of Chicago in the middle of my thesis work and undoubtedly feeling chagrined at the limbo he had left me in. I did not actually finalize my calculations until I got to Hannover Germany and borrowed a room and a calculator.

Still, it was done and I went on to Ankara to teach. Along the way, my wife Libby announced that she had decided to leave our marriage and go to travel around with another man, a fellow folk dancer. I had no advance warning or suggestion of the realignment of sentiments, but she did in fact leave after coming with me as far as Ankara and I have never met her again.

I spent a year and a half dancing with the (student's) Folk Dance Club, traveling all over Turkey and giving performances of the wonderful Turkish folk dances that I learned. I had many adventures with British ex-pat women and others, moved to Beşiktaş, Istanbul for five months with Marian from Liverpool (Penny Lane of Beatles' fame) and her daughter Elizabeth, traveled all around Eastern Turkey and ultimately left for a posting in Denmark that Steve Berry arranged. But all of that is grist for another story.

Sinanoğlu moved to a Yale outpost in Florida to occasionally teach, now that he was a tenured professor. I don't believe he ever returned to New Haven. I wanted to visit him and astound him by having a conversation in Turkish, but he died before I could make that happen. I am disappointed to this day.

~ Paul Palmer