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 |
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]
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]
Ronald 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]
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Yang Chen-Ning or Chen-Ning Yang, also known as C. N. Yang or by the English name Frank Yang, is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, and both particle physics and condensed matter physics. He and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity non-conservation of weak interaction. The two proposed that the conservation of parity, a physical law observed to hold in all other physical processes, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions, those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles. Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory.
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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