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.
[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]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 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."