Shang-keng Ma (September 24, 1940,
Chongqing,
Sichuan
Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...
, China – November 24, 1983,
La Jolla
La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood within the city of San Diego, California, United States, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781.
La Jolla is surrounded on ...
,
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
, ) was a Chinese theoretical physicist, known for his work on the theory of
critical phenomena
In physics, critical phenomena is the collective name associated with the
physics of critical points. Most of them stem from the divergence of the
correlation length, but also the dynamics slows down. Critical phenomena include scaling relatio ...
and
random systems.
[ He is known as the co-author with ]Bertrand Halperin
Bertrand I. Halperin (born December 6, 1941) is an American physicist, former holder of the Hollis Chair of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University.
Biography
Halperin was born in Brooklyn, New York, ...
and Pierre Hohenberg
Pierre C. Hohenberg (3 October 1934 – 15 December 2017) was a French-American theoretical physicist, who worked primarily on statistical mechanics. Hohenberg studied at Harvard, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degr ...
of a 1972 paper that "generalized the renormalization group theory to dynamical critical phenomena."[ Ma is also known as the co-author with ]Yoseph Imry
Yoseph Imry (Hebrew: יוסף אמרי; born 23 February 1939 – 29 May 2018) was an Israeli physicist.
He was best known for taking part in the foundation of mesoscopic physics, a relatively new branch of condensed matter physics. It is con ...
of a 1975 paper[ and with Amnon Aharony and Imry of a 1976 paper that established the foundation of the ]random field In physics and mathematics, a random field is a random function over an arbitrary domain (usually a multi-dimensional space such as \mathbb^n). That is, it is a function f(x) that takes on a random value at each point x \in \mathbb^n(or some other ...
Ising model
The Ising model () (or Lenz-Ising model or Ising-Lenz model), named after the physicists Ernst Ising and Wilhelm Lenz, is a mathematical model of ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics. The model consists of discrete variables that represent ...
(RFIM)
Biography
He transferred in 1959 from the National Taiwan University
National Taiwan University (NTU; ) is a public research university in Taipei, Taiwan.
The university was founded in 1928 during Japanese rule as the seventh of the Imperial Universities. It was named Taihoku Imperial University and served d ...
to the University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
. There he graduated in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in science and in 1966 with a Ph.D. His Ph.D. thesis ''Correlations of Photons from a Thermal Source'' was supervised by Kenneth M. Watson. As a postdoc in 1966, Ma went to the University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...
(UCSD) to study with Keith Brueckner
Keith Allen Brueckner (March 19, 1924 – September 19, 2014) was an American theoretical physicist who made important contributions in several areas of physics, including many-body theory in condensed matter physics, and laser fusion.
Biography
...
. Ma's outstanding ability earned him a faculty appointment at UCSD in less than a year. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...
(IAS) from September 1968 to June 1969 and
in the autumn of 1970. There he worked with Shau-Jin Chang on the infinite-energy limit of Feynman diagram
In theoretical physics, a Feynman diagram is a pictorial representation of the mathematical expressions describing the behavior and interaction of subatomic particles. The scheme is named after American physicist Richard Feynman, who introduc ...
s[ and with ]Roger Dashen
Roger Frederick Dashen (May 5, 1938 in Grand Junction, Colorado – May 25, 1995 in La Jolla) was an American theoretical physicist who studied particle physics and quantum field theory.
Dashen studied physics at the Harvard University (where he ...
on the S-matrix
In physics, the ''S''-matrix or scattering matrix relates the initial state and the final state of a physical system undergoing a scattering process. It is used in quantum mechanics, scattering theory and quantum field theory (QFT).
More forma ...
formulation of statistical mechanics.[ In 1971 he became a tenured faculty member of the UCSD physics department] and became a Sloan Research Fellow.
In 1976 Ma was a visiting scientist at Paris-Saclay University
Paris-Saclay University (french: Université Paris-Saclay) is a public research university based in Paris, France. It is one of the 13 prestigious universities that emerged from the division of the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne ...
and published his paper ''Renormalization group by Monte Carlo methods'', which introduced a technique which "has evolved into a powerful technology that is widely used today for the numerical study of critical phenomena."[
In the two academic years 1977–1978 and 1981–1982 he taught in Taiwan at ]Tsinghua University
Tsinghua University (; abbr. THU) is a national public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education.
The university is a member of the C9 League, Double First Class University Plan, Projec ...
, where he wrote in Chinese an advanced text on statistical mechanics — the book, published in 1983, "eschews the traditional approach built on the Gibbs ensemble." World Scientific
World Scientific Publishing is an academic publisher of scientific, technical, and medical books and journals headquartered in Singapore. The company was founded in 1981. It publishes about 600 books annually, along with 135 journals in various ...
published an English translation in 1985. In 1986 World Scientific also published a memorial volume in honor of Ma.[ Publications of Shang-Keng Ma]
p. 249p. 250p. 251p. 252
/ref>
Upon his death he was survived by his widow and two children.[
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Articles
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Books
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** 1982
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* 1985
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ma, Shang-keng
1940 births
1983 deaths
20th-century Chinese physicists
Sloan Research Fellows
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of California, San Diego faculty