SAMUEL C. C. TING

'Samuel Chao Chung Ting' (丁肇中 pinyin: Dīng Zhàozhōng; Wade-Giles: Ting¹ Chao⁴-chung¹) (born January 27, 1936) is an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for the discovery of the subatomic J/ψ particle with Burton Richter.
Ting's ancestry is Rizhao (日照縣), Shandong, on mainland China. His parents, Kuan-hai Ting (丁觀海) and Tsun-ying Jeanne Wang (王雋英), met as graduate students in Michigan and moved back to the warring China when Samuel Ting was an infant. As a result, Samuel Ting's formal childhood education had been discontinuous and sporadic, and was mostly home-schooled by his parents, who later on became professors of science and psychology, respectively, of the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. His formal education began at 12 at the prestigious Provincial Chien-Kuo High School (建國中學, now Municipal Taipei Chien-Kuo Senior High School) in Taipei and studied one year in National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City after high school.
When he returned to the USA in his 20s, Samuel Ting studied engineering, mathematics and physics at the University of Michigan. In 1959, he was awarded BSEs in both mathematics and physics, and in 1962 he earned a Doctoral degree in physics. In 1963, he worked in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (now CERN). He later taught in Columbia University, and worked in Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) of Germany. Since 1969, he has been a professor of MIT.
He gave acceptance speech of his Nobel in Mandarin. Although there had been Chinese recipients before (Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang), none offered speech in any of the Chinese languages until he did. In his speech, he emphasized the importance of experimental work equalling that of theoretical work.
In 1995, not long after the cancelling of the Superconducting Super Collider project had severely reduced the possibilities for experimental high-energy physics on earth, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a space-borne cosmic ray detector. He has since been directing the work on what the New York Times called "one of the most expensive scientific experiments ever built", with costs of $1.5 billion as of 2007.^[1]
He is a member of the National Academy of Science of USA, an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences in China and an academician of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, ROC.
He married Kay Kuhne in 1960, and has two daughters (Jeanne and Amy) from this marriage. Since 1985, he has been married to Dr. Susan Carol Marks, and has one son (Christopher).

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See also

References

External links

See also

★ MIT Physics Department

References

1. Dennis Overbye:
''Long-Awaited Cosmic-Ray Detector May Be Shelved''. The New York Times, April 3, 2007

External links

★ Autobiography

★ Faculty page at MIT

★ PBS bio

★ Nobel-Winners.com Bio