[3][1] Ma was born in January, 1948 at  Chengdu, Sichuan while Jiaocheng County in Shanxi Province was his native origin.

[4] Ma's contribution in the theory of Dirichlet forms and Markov processes brought an end to a twenty years puzzle in the field.

Ma and his team discovered a new framework of quasi-regular Dirichlet forms which correspond to right processes in one-to-one manner.

His book, written in collaboration with Michael Rockner, An Introduction to the Theory of (Non-symmetric) Dirichlet Forms, has become a notable text in this field.

He was elected as a member of the Executive Committee for International Mathematical Union in 2003 and he became the Vice president in 2007.