Today’s Doodle honours Turkish academic and scientist Dr. Remziye Hisar, the country’s first female chemist. On this day in 1991, the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council presented Hisar with the Service Award for her pioneering contribution in education throughout a lifetime.
In the year 1902, Remziye Hisar was born. She travelled to Istanbul in 1909, following her father’s civil employment, where she demonstrated her remarkable intelligence by completing three years of primary school in just one year. Because there were few women in science, she decided to study chemistry at Darülfünun, which is now Istanbul University.
Hisar continued her chemical studies in 1923 at Paris’s famed Sorbonne University, one of the few Turkish women to do so at the time. She studied under a number of pioneering scientists, including Marie Curie, the first woman to earn a Nobel Prize in Physics. She became the first Turkish woman to graduate from the Sorbonne the following year. Hisar finished her doctoral thesis in 1933, the same year she started working at Istanbul University as a chemistry researcher and professor. Hisar worked in numerous scientific divisions until 1973, when she retired.
Hisar is generally regarded with setting the groundwork for modern Turkish scientific research, particularly that of her son Feza Gürsey, a renowned theoretical physicist, and daughter Deha Gürsey, one of the few Turks to work for the International Psychological Union.
Dr. Remziye Hisar, a scientific pioneer who helped change the international scientific community’s composition, is honoured today!
