Shang-keng Ma

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.

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.

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.

Articles

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(over 1000 citations) (over 600 citations) (over 3100 citations)

(over 450 citations)

Books

1982

1985