2007-9-14

Samuel Chao Chung Ting, whose ancestral home was in Rizhao, Shandong Province, China, was born on 27 January 1936 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had his early schooling in China and went to Taiwan with his father in 1949 and to the US in 1956. He graduated from the University of Michagon in 1959. In three more years, by 1962, Ting had received M.S. and Ph.D. as well. In 1978, he obtained honorary doctor degree in science. He went to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a Ford Foundation Fellow in 1963. Ting joined the physics faculty at Columbia University as a lecturer in 1964 and an associated professor from 1965 to 1967. Ting conducted experiments at the Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany in 1966 when Ting's research group built a new detector that ultimately helped to confirm that the theory and experimental results regarding electron-positron pairs were in harmony. Ting subsequently joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967. He was appointed as the first Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute Professor of Physics at MIT in 1977, and project consultant of American Physical Society and vice editor of Nuclear Physics Bulletin in 1970. Five years later, he was elected as an academician of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1974 he and Richter, Professor of Stanford University in California, almost simultaneously discovered the new elementary particle- particle J (the life of this particle equals a thousand times to that of any other particles), that is, the bound states of the 4th quark, and thus they both won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics and the United States government's Lawrence Award.

In 1978 he was elected as an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences, USA and the member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Apart from working in the MIT, he mainly worked in the European Nuclear Research Center and the German Electron-Synchrotron (in Hamburg).

Since 1975 he has been invited to visit China many times and conduct academic exchanges, employed by the China Science and Technology University as Professor Emeritus. In Autumn 1977, during his visit to China, he proposed to Deng Xiaoping sending physicists from the Chinese Academy of Science to join his MARK - J experiment in Hamburg, Germany. In January 1978, 10 Chinese physicists went to Hamburg and attended the international cooperation of the MARD-J experiment. Since then, more than 100 Chinese physicists and graduate students went to work and study in the experimental group under his leadership. Under his leadership and help, the Chinese scientists played an important role in the design, manufacture and data analysis of the L3 detector, which has gained a position of prestige in the international high energy physics experiments for China. On July 4, 1992, he was conferred honorary doctorate by the China Science and Technology University. In June 1994, he was elected as a foreign Academician of the CAS of the first group. In 1996, he won the China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of the year. On April 18, 2003, he was named as the honorary director of the newly established Space Science and Technology Research Center of Shanghai Jiaotong University.