Ting's ancestry is Rizhao County (日照縣), Shandong. His parents met as students in Michigan and moved back to the warring China when he 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: Kuan-hai Ting (丁觀海) and Tsun-ying Jeanne Wang (王雋英), who were China- and US-educated professors -- of science and psychology, respectively -- of the National Taiwan University. His formal education began at 12 at Chien-kuo Middle School (建國中學 Jìanguó) in Taipei, Taiwan, and studied one year in National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City.
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.
He married Kay Kuhne in 1960, and has two daughters (Jeanne and Amy) from that marriage. Since 1985, he has been married to Dr. Susan Carol Marks, and has one son (Christopher).
Samuel Chao Chung Ting (ä¸è‚‡ä¸ pinyin: DÄ«ng Zhà ozhÅng; Wade-Giles: Ting¹ Chaoâ´-chung¹) (born January 27, 1936) is a Michigan-born Chinese American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for the discovery of the subatomic ψ particle with Burton Richter.
Ting's ancestry is Rizhao (日照縣), Shandong, on mainland China.
As a result, SamuelTing'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.
One of Ting's graduate school classmates at the UM was Homer Neal, UM President Emeritus and now a physicist active in the ATLAS experiment, a major research project situated at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
In the end, Ting concluded that the experiment provided evidence for a new elementary particle that was three times heavier than a proton and much longer-lived than any resonant state of elementary particles known up to that time (where "long life" is often measured in minute fractions of a second).
Ting at CERN Symposium in honor of the UM's Lawrence Jones, December, 1998.
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