Korkut Bardaci, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, passed away on March 16, 2024, in Oakland California. He was 87.
Korkut Bardakci received his B.S. from Robert College, Turkey in 1957 and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1962, where he studied axiomatic quantum field theory. After postdoctoral appointments at the University of Minnesota and the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the UC Berkeley Physics Department as an assistant professor in 1966. He has been a Sloan Foundation fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and an Overseas visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, England.
Professor Bardakci made seminal contributions to Quantum Chromodynamics and String Theory. Together with his colleague and friend Martin B. Halpern, Prof. Bardakci discovered a new type of mathematical structure within String Theory, Affine Lie Algebras, which enjoyed far reaching applications. He published over 80 works developing additional aspects of String Theory and its applications to the understanding of quarks and gluons.
Prof. Bardakci lived in Berkeley with his spouse, Ruth Bardakci, who passed away six years ago, and he moved to a retirement community in Oakland shortly afterwards.