Prof. Bambi Hu (born 1945)
BORN
June 4, 1945
DIED
November 21, 2015
LOCATION
Houston, Texas
Obituary
Forest Park Westheimer Funeral Home Obituary
Prof. Bambi Hu, age 70, died at Methodist Hospital on Saturday, November 21, 2015, after battling a rare neurodegenerative disease, Multiple System Atrophy, for two years.Born June 4, 1945 in Chong Qing, China, Bambi lived in Hong Kong, France, and the USA. He graduated from Pui Ching Middle...
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/bambi-hu-obituary?pid=176611687
A CLOSED LOOP
BAMBI HU
Department of Physics, Centre for Nonlinear Studies,
and The Beijing-Hong Kong-Singapore Joint Centre for Nonlinear
and Complex Systems (Hong Kong), Hong Kong Baptist University,
Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China
and
Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-5005, USA
I was born in Chonqing, China in 1945. My father, I-Ping Hu ( ) was a
banker, and my mother, Pie Wang ( ), a doctor. In the first half of the 20th
century, China was ravaged by war and poverty. My grandfather passed away when
my father was three years old and my maternal grandmother passed away when my
mother was thirteen years old. Both my parents endured tremendous hardships to
establish themselves.
My family moved to Hong Kong in 1949.We stayed in a small village, Ping Shan,
near Yuen Long. Life was very hard then. There were eight of us in the family: my
grandmother,my parents, my aunt, my cousin, my two younger brothers and myself.
My parents had to start from scratch to make ends meet. Although the material
life was quite poor, we did not feel particularly deprived. Both my brothers and I
still cherish fond memories of our childhood in this small village.
I entered Pui-ChingMiddle School in 1953. Pui-Ching was—and still is—a private
Chinese language school. As expected, under the British colonial rule, Chinese
schools were very much discriminated against. Most of the teachers were educated
in China but their credentials were not recognized by the Hong Kong government.
However, they were highly qualified (some of them later taught in universities) and
dedicated teachers. They also had a deep sense of mission. They prided themselves
on their Chinese cultural heritage but were also keenly aware of China’s backwardness
and its consequent humiliation since the mid-19th century. They instilled into
the student a deep love and respect for knowledge and an aspiration to excel. Their
efforts were not wasted. Pui-Ching has produced some world-class mathematicians
and physicists such as Alfred Y. Cho, Lu L. Sham, Yum-Tong Siu, Dan C. Tsui,
and Shing-Tung Yau. The school put a special emphasis on mathematics and the
teachers were truly first-rate. They were very good not only in teaching mathematics
but also in inspiring students to love mathematics. So it was not surprising that
it produced some world-class mathematicians. On the other hand, the physics education
was quite poor. We only learned geometric optics and a little mechanics. So
it was quite surprising that it produced some world-class physicists. What was even
more surprising was that it produced some world-class experimental physicists. It
probably had more to do with the calibre of the student, the ethos of the school
and the training in mathematics.
Upon graduation from high school, I entered the University of California at
Berkeley in 1963. Berkeley opened up an entirely new intellectual vista for me. The
vault of knowledge seemed to be limitless. Studying in the US also provided me with
an opportunity to compare the cultural, historical, political and social differences
between China and the West.
I first chose philosophy as my major. In middle school, my favorite subjects were
Chinese literature, history and mathematics. My favourite writer is Lu Xun, whose
writing has exerted an indelible influence on my life and my outlook. However, in
high school, my interests broadened and my mind became more and more inquisitive.
There were so many unanswered questions in life, and philosophy seemed
to be the only discipline that was broad enough to encompass my curiosities. My
freshman advisor was Thomas Nagel. He just received his Ph.D. from Harvard
and joined Berkeley as an assistant professor. He has since become a very famous
philosopher. However, after studying philosophy for some time, I became troubled
by the problem of progress in philosophy. It seemed to me that there is no clear idea
of progress in philosophy: a theory 2,500 years ago is just as good as a theory now.
Also, my interest in philosophy gradually gravitated to the philosophy of science.
At the same time, the physics department at Berkeley introduced the Berkeley
Physics Course. It created tremendous excitement among the students. Many topics
in modern physics such as the special theory of relativity were taught in the
freshman year. I also thought it was impossible for one to study the philosophy of
science without having a deep knowledge of a field of science. Therefore I decided to
change my major from philosophy to physics. However, the upper-division physics
courses, with the exception of quantum mechanics, were more or less drills and thus
not so exciting as the Berkeley Physics Course.
Upon completion of my study at Berkeley, I went to Cornell in 1969 for graduate
study. Cornell was quite different from Berkeley. During my study at Berkeley, I
hardly knew any professor personally. Cornell was much more personal. The professors
were quite nice and more approachable. In studying physics, I have to confess
I am more attracted to its beauty than its truth. Beauty is usually associated with
art; that beauty can also be found in science was a revelation to me. Attracted by
its simplicity, unity and beauty, I decided to work on theoretical particle physics.
My thesis advisor was Peter Carruthers. Pete was a very amiable and talented per-
son. He played the violin and wrote poems. It was very regrettable that he died at
a relatively young age.
Cornell was a very exciting place during my graduate career. It produced four
Nobel laureates.Wilson proposed the renormalization-group theory of second-order
phase transitions, and Lee, Osheroff and Richarson discovered the A-phase of superfluid
He3. Although I did not work on the renormalization group then, Wilson’s
intellectual influence was quite pervasive and it indelibly affected my future work.
Another distinctive feature of Cornell’s research was its emphasis on interdisciplinary
study such as that between quantum field theory and statistical mechanics.
It was a very turbulent time during my study in the US. Berkeley was the hotbed
of student movements. First there was the “Civil Rights Movement”, then the “Free
Speech Movement”, then the “Anti-War Movement”, etc. Before long, almost every
campus in the US was engulfed by student movements. Inevitably, those movements
affected my thinking and aroused my social consciousness. In graduate school, I was
very active in many of the student movements. My motivation was however ethical
rather than political, and it could be summed up in one word: Justice. Although
my participation in the student movements has taken a heavy toll of my study and
career, I have no regret. Compared to human suffering and injustice, everything
else takes a back seat.
After completion of my Ph.D., I went to France in 1974 to do postdoctoral work,
first at Saclay and then at ÅLEcole Polytechnique. It was in Paris where I met my
future wife Kok-Yee Lok. She was a graduate of the Paris Conservatory, specializing
in singing. It was music that bound us together.
After France, I went to Brown University in 1977 as a postdoc of Leo Kadanoff.
Leo was very kind and encouraging. It was he who induced me to work on phase
transitions.
In 1978, I joined the University of Houston as an assistant professor. I was
promoted to associate professor in 1983 and professor in 1987.
Hong Kong was ceded to Britain as a result of the Opium War. The Opium
War was as much a shame for the victor as for the loser. It left a deep scar on the
psyche of the Chinese people. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was one of
the most momentous events in modern Chinese history. In 1995, at the persuasion
of Professor C. F. Ng, then Dean of the Faculty of Science, I returned to Hong
Kong and took up the headship of the physics department of Hong Kong Baptist
University (HKBU). It has been thirty-two years since I first left Hong Kong that I
have come full circle. What the value of the integral of this closed loop is, I do not
know — I only know that it is not zero. In any case, it marked a new turning-point
of my life.
The physics department at HKBU is a small department, the smallest of all the
physics departments in Hong Kong. It has only ten faculty members. There is a
strict pecking order in Hong Kong. The department had very few resources and it
was not very active in research. How to turn the department into a research-active
department in order to compete with the major universities was not an easy task.
In the past twelve years, the physics department has made tremendous progress.
In the latest Research Assessment Exercise held in 2006, the percentage of active
researchers in the department reached 97.5%. This remarkable achievement was
mainly due to the efforts of my colleagues. My only contribution was to motivate
them and help them realize their potential.
I set up the Centre for Nonlinear Studies (CNS) at HKBU in 1996. In the past
eleven years, CNS has hosted approximately 125 postdocs and visitors. This generation
of young nonlinear physicists is now playing an important role in the Asia-
Pacific region, especially in China. Whatever success CNS has been able to achieve,
it was mainly due to the contribution of these young members. I also proposed
and co-founded The Beijing–Hong Kong–Singapore Joint Centre for Nonlinear and
Complex Systems in 2004.
I started the conference series Dynamics Days Asia-Pacific: International Conference
on Nonlinear Science in Hong Kong in 1999. It has since been held in
China (2002), Singapore (2004), Korea (2006), and it is scheduled to be held in
Japan (2008), Australia (2010), Taiwan (2012), and India (2014).
Although the research environment in the US is better, one does not always get
beyond doing one’s own work. Building up something in one’s homeland is at least
as meaningful a task as doing one’s research. The satisfaction derived from this
endeavor may even be greater.
I have worked mainly in three areas: quantum field theory, phase transitions,
and nonlinear dynamics. The transition from one area to the other was a gradual
one. Of all my works, I will mention only four. I mention these works not because
of their importance or even correctness, but because of their interesting ideas — at
least to myself. The first was a joint work with Joe Rudnick on the exact solutions to
the functional renormalization-group equations for intermittency [24].† The second
was a joint work with Baowen Li and Hong Zhao on heat conduction in the Frenkel-
Kontorova model [99]. The third was a joint work with A. Chakrabarti on deriving
non-abelian gauge theories from the four-fermion interaction model [6]. The fourth
was a work on the problem of universality in phase transitions on fractals [35]. All
in all, I am not at all satisfied with any of my work — if anything, I would consider
my career a failure.
I am near the twilight of my career. Looking back, I have to say that I have
had a rather blessed life. Most of the people I knew have been kind and generous
to me. My grandmother was an embodiment of the traditional virtues of a Chinese
woman: devotion, self-sacrifice, discipline and kindness. I have a loving family: my
wife Kok-Yee, my daughters Chu-Mei, Chu-Ching, Chu-Ying, my son-in-law Brian,
and my grandchildren Cori and Alex. My brothers Bei-Lok and Shiu-Lok and I
are very close to one another. We share pretty much the same values, ideal and
interests. I am extremely grateful to my aunt, who took care of me and my daughter.
She was like a second-mother to me. My cousins Hai-Wei, Kuen-Wai and his wife
Sau-Lan are always kind and caring. Last but not least, I owe everything in my
life to my parents. They sacrificed everything in their life to bring me up. Their
unconditional and unswerving love and support has been an anchor in my life. My
father passed away in 2001 and my mother in 2007. My mother had devoted her life
to the family with total dedication and self-sacrifice. She took a great interest in the
conference, and it is an eternal regret that she did not live to see the publication of
the proceedings.With deepest love and respect, I dedicate this essay to her memory.
Int.