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Shang-keng Ma

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Chinese-American physicist known for his lucid review articles of renormalization group theory
Shang-keng Ma
馬上庚
Born(1940-09-24)September 24, 1940
Chongqing, Sichuan, China
DiedNovember 24, 1983(1983-11-24) (aged 43)
La Jolla, California
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
ThesisCorrelations of Photons from a Thermal Source (1966)
Doctoral advisorKenneth 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)

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. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study (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 diagrams and with Roger Dashen on the S-matrix formulation of statistical mechanics. In 1971 he became a tenured faculty member of the UCSD physics department and became a Sloan Research Fellow.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

Articles

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Books

References

  1. "Shang-keng Ma Papers". Online Archive California (OAC).
  2. ^ Chen, Joseph C. Y.; Prentis, Jeffrey; Schultz, Sheldon (1984). "Shang-keng Ma". Physics Today. 37 (4): 102–103. Bibcode:1984PhT....37d.102C. doi:10.1063/1.2916178.
  3. 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. arXiv:1711.09597. Bibcode:2018JSP...172..665F. doi:10.1007/s10955-018-1955-7. S2CID 115133326. arXiv preprint
  4. "Shang-Keng Ma". Institute for Advanced Study (ias.edu). 9 December 2019.
  5. "Shau-Jin Chang". Institute for Advanced Study (ias.edu). 9 December 2019.
  6. "Roger Dashen". Institute for Advanced Study (ias.edu). 9 December 2019.
  7. ^ Chen, Joseph C. Y.; Schultz, Sheldon; Sham, Lu Jeu. "Shang-Keng Ma, Physics: San Diego, 1940–1983, Professor". Online Archive of California.
  8. "Sloan Research Fellows in Physics or Chemistry, 1971". Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (sloan.org).
  9. Wu, Fa Yueh (2009). "Eulogy on Shang-Keng Ma". Exactly Solved Models: A Journey in Statistical Mechanics : Selected Papers with Commentaries (1963-2008). World Scientific. pp. 68–69. ISBN 9789812813886.
  10. Grinstein, Geoffrey; Mazenko, Gene F., eds. (August 1986). Directions in Condensed Matter Physics: Memorial Volume in Honor of Shang-keng Ma. World Scientific. ISBN 9789814513609. Publications of Shang-Keng Ma: p. 249 p. 250 p. 251 p. 252
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