Showing posts with label Probability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Probability. Show all posts

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Getting to know Ming Chen Wang (王明贞)

I was sitting in front of a nice little old book: "Selected Papes on Noise and Stochastic Processes", edited by Nelson Wax, 1954, published by Dover Publishing. In it contained were several nice review articles on Brownian motion, one of which was by Ming Chen Wang and G.E. Uhlenbeck, On the Theory of the Brownian Motion II, reprint from Reviews of Modern Physics, 1945. Who is Ming Chen Wang and where is he or she now?

It turned out that Ming Chen Wang has a Chinese name, 王明贞, who was a little-known physics professor at Tsinghua University since 1955 in Beijing, China. Except for 7 years in prison apparently due to her husband's connection to Jiang Qing, one of the Gang of Four and Chairman Mao's wife during 1966-1973, she taught physics to China's students, just like many other teachers, and until 2010 when she died at the age of 104. 

The only English account I can find of her is here:  https://sites.google.com/site/kaizhangstatmech/chinese-scientists/mcwang.  She was one of the pioneers in women in sciences, and it took her a lot of efforts to obtain an opportunity to go to college and years of work in order to go to abroad for further study. Her PhD was obtained in 1942 (at the age of 36) in physics at the University of Michigan, with a thesis: A Study of Various Solutions of the Boltzmann Equation. Her employement history was a little strange, she worked at MIT as a research scientist for a few years, then she went back to China, worked as a professor at Yunnan University till 1949. Then, suddenly, right before China was liberated, she went back to US to work at the University of Notre Dam for a few years until 1953, when she decided to go back to China again. She succeded in 1955 to return to China. My guess is that, as a woman, she needed to follow her husband in her moves and also in consideration of her other relatives such as her brother, who was more famous as a physicist and later as a goverment official at the same time in the US. But for her career, too many moves may not be too good. On the other hand, after arriving at Tsinghua University in 1955, due to New China's in education and everything at the beginning of developments, and influences from the Russia, she did not continue her research career at all and she devoted all her time to education. (Actually she was able to teach from 1955-1966, and due to imprisonment from 1966-1973, she did not resume her academic work and retired in 1976, see ref.1.) In recent years she finally got some well-deserved recognition from her university and colleagues, and she was bestowed with some high honors, even being called China's Madam Currie (which may be a little exaggerated), and maybe  China or Tsinghua U. has finally realized what they have missed over these many chaotic years after all!
Reference: see also, 1. 王明贞:转瞬九十载, 物理,
2. 布朗运动理论一百年
郝柏林, 2011, 物理,
40, 第一期