Ta-Pei Cheng (鄭大培) was born 1941 and grew up in Shanghai, spending also a good part of his childhood in the seaside city of Qingdao 青岛. In 1956, there was a rare liberal moment in the Communist early years — the so-called “Hundred Flowers Movement” 百花齐放 — Ta-Pei and his sister Leepo were able to join their parents in the then-British colony of Hong Kong. Upon graduation from the high school Pui-Ching 培正中学 there, he moved to the U.S. to attend Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. After his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Rockefeller University in New York and postdoc research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in 1973, he joined the University of Missouri – St. Louis faculty. Following more than 40 years of teaching and research in Saint Louis, Ta-Pei is now retired and living in Portland, Oregon.

Ta-Pei’s research area is theoretical particle physics. He started his graduate education at the RU group of Abraham Pais, one of the founding fathers of the field. He eventually worked in the area of gauge theory and the quark structure of the nucleon. He did pioneering work (starting with postdoc under Roger Dashen) showing that protons contain many strange and anti-strange quark pairs. Ta-Pei was among the early investigators looking into the question of whether neutrinos can have masses, making it possible for the superposition of quantum mechanical states to manifest the feature of spontaneously changing, “oscillating,” from one flavor (say, electron-neutrino) to another (say, muon-neutrino). Such work led him, & LF Li, to present the first gauge theory of μ → eγ, the lepton-flavor-changing radiative transition of a muon into an electron, which is a powerful probe of new physics — accessing higher energy scales through quantum fluctuations. According to a compilation by Google Scholar, his publications have been cited about 10k times in research journals. He has given over 100 invited talks at conferences, research centers, and university physics departments here and abroad.

Ta-Pei and Professor Ling-Fong Li of Carnegie Mellon University were the coauthors of three books on gauge theory, two of them published by Oxford University Press and one by AAPT. Their 1984 book “Gauge Theory of Elementary Particle Physics” was among the first graduate quantum field theory texts on the Standard Model of Particle Physics. It has remained one of the more often-used ones worldwide.

The remarkable advances since the 1960s in astrophysics and cosmology have brought about an upsurge of interest in Einstein’s theory of gravitation (called General Relativity). On that subject, Ta-Pei has written two well-received books (one being part of the Oxford Master Series in Physics), focused on relativity, black holes & cosmology. On these subjects he also presents a free YouTube online course (@GR-Cheng).

Finally, he is the author of the book “Einstein’s Physics, …” which covers the full range of that great physicist’s work: atoms, quanta, and relativity, as well as the development since his time. While there have been many books about Einstein, most explain his achievement only in qualitative terms. This is rather unsatisfactory as the language of physics is mathematics. One needs to know the equations to understand his physics: the precise nature of his contribution, its context, and its influence. In Ta-Pei’s book, all physics equations are worked out in detail – at a level that a physics undergraduate can follow.

Ta-Pei was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1982. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, the UC Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the University of Minnesota, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. To do research, he has also paid extended visits to CERN (the European Center for Particle Research), Niels Bohr Institute (Copenhagen), Sapienza University of Rome, Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Aspen Center for Physics. 

For over 40 years, Ta-Pei has been married to Leslie Su Cheng. In 2021, they moved their home from Saint Louis to Portland -- to be closer to their three sons’ families, who live on (or near) the US West Coast.

Last updated 4-1-2023