Shang-keng Ma explained

Shang-keng Ma
Native Name:馬上庚
Native Name Lang:zh
Birth Date:September 24, 1940
Birth Place:Chongqing,[1] Sichuan, China
Death Place:La Jolla, California
Fields:Physics
Alma Mater:University of California, Berkeley
Thesis Title:Correlations of Photons from a Thermal Source
Thesis Url:https://search.library.berkeley.edu/permalink/01UCS_BER/1thfj9n/alma991076919689706532
Thesis Year:1966
Doctoral Advisor:Kenneth M. Watson

Shang-keng Ma (September 24, 1940 – November 24, 1983) was a Chinese theoretical physicist, known for his work on the theory of critical phenomena and random systems. He is known as the co-author with Bertrand Halperin and Pierre Hohenberg 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 of a 1975 paper and with Amnon Aharony and Imry of a 1976 paper that established the foundation of the random field Ising model (RFIM)[2]

Biography

He transferred in 1959 from the National Taiwan University to the University of California, Berkeley. 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 (UCSD) to study with Keith Brueckner. Ma's outstanding ability earned him a faculty appointment at UCSD in less than a year.[3] He was at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) from September 1968 to June 1969 and in the autumn of 1970.[4] There he worked with Shau-Jin Chang on the infinite-energy limit of Feynman diagrams[3] [5] and with Roger Dashen on the S-matrix formulation of statistical mechanics.[3] [6] In 1971 he became a tenured faculty member of the UCSD physics department[7] and became a Sloan Research Fellow.[8]

In 1976 Ma was a visiting scientist at Paris-Saclay University 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."[3]

In the two academic years 1977–1978 and 1981–1982 he taught in Taiwan at Tsinghua University, 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 published an English translation in 1985. In 1986 World Scientific also published a memorial volume in honor of Ma.[9]

Upon his death he was survived by his widow and two children.[7]

Articles

Books

References

  1. Web site: Shang-keng Ma Papers. Online Archive California (OAC).
  2. Fytas, N.G.. Martín-Mayor, V.. Picco, M.. Sourlas, N.. 2018. Review of recent developments in the random-field Ising model. Journal of Statistical Physics. 172. 2. 665–672. 10.1007/s10955-018-1955-7. 1711.09597 . 2018JSP...172..665F . 115133326 . arXiv preprint
  3. 10.1063/1.2916178. Shang-keng Ma. 1984. Chen. Joseph C. Y.. Prentis. Jeffrey. Schultz. Sheldon. Physics Today. 37. 4. 102–103. 1984PhT....37d.102C.
  4. Web site: Shang-Keng Ma. Institute for Advanced Study (ias.edu). 9 December 2019 .
  5. Web site: Shau-Jin Chang. Institute for Advanced Study (ias.edu). 9 December 2019 .
  6. Web site: Roger Dashen. Institute for Advanced Study (ias.edu). 9 December 2019 .
  7. Web site: Shang-Keng Ma, Physics: San Diego, 1940–1983, Professor. Chen, Joseph C. Y.. Schultz, Sheldon. Sham, Lu Jeu. Online Archive of California.
  8. Web site: Sloan Research Fellows in Physics or Chemistry, 1971. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (sloan.org).
  9. Book: Grinstein, Geoffrey. Mazenko, Gene F.. Directions in Condensed Matter Physics: Memorial Volume in Honor of Shang-keng Ma. 9789814513609. August 1986. World Scientific. Publications of Shang-Keng Ma: p. 249 p. 250 p. 251 p. 252

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