When, after a year of medical school, Oz Yilmaz changed his educational goals to pursue a career in geophysics, our profession gained a superbly productive scientist and teacher. As teacher, he wrote in 1987 the all-time SEG best seller, Seismic Data Processing, a profusely illustrated, comprehensive textbook on how to process reflection seismic data. Now in its fifth printing, the 538-page volume has been accepted worldwide in industry and academia as the definitive resource on the subject. In 1990 Oz
supplemented the book with an SEG-published, 24-hour set of video tapes that has enabled the world to benefit from the dynamism of his personality in a crystal-clear exposition of what, in other hands, could have been a dry-as-dust recitation of formulae and algorithms.
Both the book and the taped course were the culmination of many years of hands-on teaching and the accumulation of a series of examples illustrative of every step, option, and nuance of reflection seismic processing. That many oil companies and contractors contributed to his collection and gave their permission for publication, attests to the high esteem in which he and his work are universally held.
Oz, however, is that rare individual that combines teaching skill with the innovative and productive work of a talented scientist. His 1979 PhD thesis (published in 1980) Prestack partial migration was a major contribution to practical seismic processing. In his relentless pursuit of the goal of achieving practical inversion of seismic data that is of deciphering the configuration and nature of the rocks beneath our feet from geophysical data he has generated inventive solutions to problems not only in
migration but in multiple suppression, velocity analysis, and compensation for near-surface effects.
Most recently he has demonstrated his versatility through publications in reservoir analysis by innovatively applying work that he had done for a masters degree in rock physics 15 years earlier.
Oz Yilmaz, born in Kars, Turkey, just a few miles from Soviet Georgia, graduated from Haydarpasha Lyceum (high school) in Istanbul and shortly thereafter won a coveted sponsorship from the Turkish government to study geology/geophysics at the University
of Missouri-Rolla where in 1970 he earned a first-honors BS. After earning an MS in 1972 at Stanford University for his work in rock physics, he returned to his native land to join the Turkish Petroleum Company as processing geophysicist and research geophysicist. By the time he left, after five years, he had become chief geophysicist.
Returning to Stanford, Oz earned his PhD in the record time of one year. Courted by a number of oil companies and geophysical contractors, Oz Yilmaz selected the one among them that he felt offered him the greatest opportunity to make a significant contribution to his profession. At Western Geophysical he functioned as senior research geophysicist until he took a one-year leave of absence to rejoin the Turkish Petroleum Company where he became assistant manager of exploration. After returning to Western, he was transferred to London where he now resides with his dentist wife, Hulya, and his 12-year-old son Esen Lesgi. Today he is manager of research and development at Western's European headquarters.
In the excellent English that he acquired through diligent effort and polished at the English Language Institute in Long Island, New York, Oz has been quoted on his philosophy of science: "The thinking process is continuing for the scientist, you must be able to think a problem through even while you sleep. . ." To accomplish all that Oz Yilmaz has accomplished in his young life, his indefatigable diligence must surely have been guided by his consistent thinking.
Carl H. Savit and Ken Larner
