Shang-keng Ma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shang-keng Ma | |
|---|---|
馬上庚 | |
| Born | September 24, 1940 |
| Died | November 24, 1983 (aged 43) |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Thesis | Correlations of Photons from a Thermal Source (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.[2] 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."[2] Ma is also known as the co-author with Yoseph Imry of a 1975 paper[2] and with Amnon Aharony and Imry of a 1976 paper that established the foundation of the random field Ising model (RFIM)[3]
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.[2] 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[2][5] and with Roger Dashen on the S-matrix formulation of statistical mechanics.[2][6] In 1971 he became a tenured faculty member of the UCSD physics department[7] and became a Sloan Research Fellow.[8]
He visited Cornell University in 1972 where he became involved in development of the renormalization theory of critical phenomena. Gradually, his interest shifted to statistical physics.[9]
In 1975, with Yoseph Imry, he published the seminal paper on the effect of a random magnetic field on ferro-magnetic order. Their model has come to be known as the random field Ising model.[2]
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."[2]
In 1981, Ma formulated the "coincidence counting" method for the calculation of entropy from the phase space trajectory. He felt strongly that such a dynamical formulation of entropy was crucial for understanding random and other systems exhibiting metastability.[2]
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.[10]
Upon his death he was survived by his widow and two children.[7]
