Dr. Feza Gursey, an award-winning physicist and a retired Yale University professor, died April 13 at Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven. He was 71 years old and lived in Hamden, Conn.
Dr. Gursey, who taught at Yale from 1965 to 1991, won the Oppenheimer Prize, the Einstein Medal, awards from the New York Academy of Sciences and the Group Theory and Fundamental Physics Foundation and honors from France and Italy.
Specializing in elementary particles, he introduced new ideas on the symmetries of weak and strong interactions and proposed the nonlinear sigma model for chiral symmetry.
Among his more than 100 published papers was an important collaboration on the spin and unitary spin independence of strong interaction, known as SU(6) symmetry. He also worked on grand unified gauge theories, octonions and quaternions, scattering problems and supersymmetry in subnuclear particles.
This article is adapted from the obituary which appeared in the New York Times issue of April 24, 1992.