Hasan Ozbekhan, 85, professor at Wharton

Hasan Ozbekhan, 85, a Turkish-born social-systems philosopher who was a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for 22 years, died of a pulmonary embolism Feb. 12 at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. He lived in Queen Village.

Professor Ozbekhan, whose father was an international diplomat, was born near Istanbul and graduated from high school in Rome. He spoke Turkish, French, Italian, Spanish and English.

Professor Ozbekhan earned a bachelor's degree from the London School of Economics in 1942.

He moved to Canada, then New York, where he was a strategic planner for General Electric and other corporations.

In 1949, he married Cynthia Gooding, a folk singer, and the couple had two daughters. They divorced in 1954.

Professor Ozbekhan moved to Los Angeles in 1960, where he continued to work for GE and married Anne Binnkley.

Penn lured him to Wharton in 1970 by offering a full professorship to teach in a department he founded: social systems sciences.

"His classes were among the most popular on campus," said former MBA student Ali Gerenmayah, a New York financial director. "He went beyond numbers and marketing by advocating a holistic view of business and social sciences."

Professor Ozbekhan invited students to dinners at his home to learn manners and to enjoy different cuisines and how to act in different cultural situations.

"He was witty and had encyclopedic knowledge about issues that some MBAs were not good at," said Gerenmayah.

While at Penn, Professor Ozbekhan was a leader of two think-tank projects - the Club of Rome and the Paris Project.

He and others worked on the Club of Rome, founded by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei. "It was an early study of world limits of consumption and production," said Aleko Christakis, who worked on the project. "It was the beginning of the global environmental movement."

The French government paid Professor Ozbekhan and others in the early 1970s for the Paris Project - a plan for Paris to become the capital of the world. As a result, Paris got its first mayor in more than 100 years, Jacques Chirac, in 1977, Christakis said. "Some of the ideas fizzled out, but some worked," he said.

Professor Ozbekhan was on several planning projects for Philadelphia. "He had ideas," Christakis said. "They were not slam-dunk, magic solutions."

In addition to his wife, Professor Ozbekhan is survived by daughters Leyla Spencer and Ayshe; stepdaughter Catherine Rand; and four grandchildren.

A memorial service was being planned.