Ronald Shaw was a British physicist and mathematician. He is known for preceding Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills in the creation of Yang-Mills theory under the supervision of Abdus Salam.[1]
Ronald Shaw | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 5, 1929 |
| Died | 2016 (age 86) |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Known for | Yang–Mills theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics |
Shaw decided not to publish the theory that he had found in January of 1954, and Yang and Mills would publish their results in October of 1954. Shaw would later add the theory to a single chapter of his thesis in 1956.[2][3]
Life
editRonald Shaw was born in Tunstall, Staffordshire, on September 5th, 1929. He would begin national service as a dentist in 1947 in Derby and would stop his service in 1949. Shaw would later go on to become a student at Cambridge, sitting the mathematical tripos. After getting his doctorate in 1955, Shaw would become a lecturer at the University of Hull, where he would stay for the rest of his life, becoming a personal chair in the mathematical physics department in 1989, then an emeritus professor in 1995.[1]
Shaw's main focus was on finite geometry, and he remained interested in it up until his passing in 2016.[4]
Abdus Salam would give credit to Shaw for the creation of Yang-Mills theory during his Nobel Prize lecture, calling the theory "Yang-Mills-Shaw gauge theory".[5]
References
edit- ^ a b Atiyah, M. (2017). "Ronald Shaw 1929–2016 by Michael Atiyah (1954)". Trinity College Annual Record (memorial). 2017: 137–146.
- ^ Shaw, Ronald (September 1956). The problem of particle types and other contributions to the theory of elementary particles (Ph.D. thesis). University of Cambridge. ch. 3, pp. 34–46.
- ^ Fraser, Gordon (2008). Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam – the first Muslim Nobel scientist. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. p. 117. ISBN 978-0199208463.
- ^ Shaw, Marion (2016-09-05). "Ronald Shaw obituary". the Guardian. Retrieved 2024-10-19.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979". NobelPrize.org. 1979-12-08. Retrieved 2024-10-19.
Now the fact that I was using gauge ideas similar to the Yang - Mills (non-Abelian SU(2)-invariant) gauge theory was no news to me. This was because the Yang - Mills theory [9] (which married gauge ideas of Maxwell with the internal symmetry SU(2) of which the proton-neutron system con-stituted a doublet had been independently invented by a Ph. D. pupil of mine, Ronald Shaw,[10] at Cambridge at the same time as Yang and Mills had written. Shaw's work is relatively unknown; it remains buried in his Cambridge thesis
External links
edit- "Ronald Shaws Personal Website (archived)". Archived from the original on 2016-02-23.