American Philosophical Society
Member History

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Residency
Resident (2)
Class
1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences[X]
Subdivision
106. Physics[X]
1Name:  Dr. N. David Mermin
 Institution:  Cornell University
 Year Elected:  2015
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1935
   
 
N. David Mermin received an A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1956. He stayed at Harvard, changing to physics, where he received a Ph.D. in 1961. He spent two postdoctoral years in Rudolf Peierls’ Department of Mathematical Physics in Birmingham England, followed by a year with Walter Kohn at the University of California, San Diego, before he joined Physics Department at Cornell University in 1964. Mermin was Director of Cornell’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics from 1984 to 1990, and retired from Cornell as the Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus, in 2006. He is known for the Mermin-Wagner theorem in statistical mechanics, the Mermin-Ho relation in low-temperature physics, and the Lindhard-Mermin dielectric function in metals physics. He extended the fundamental theorem of density-functional theory to thermal equilibrium (chemistry), reformulated space-groups to include aperiodic crystals (crystallography), and applied topology to the theory of defects (condensed matter physics). He has written extensively about foundational issues in quantum mechanics. His 1976 book Solid State Physics (with Neil W. Ashcroft) has been translated into six languages and remains the major text in the field, though still in its original edition. His Quantum Computer Science (2007) offers a unique perspective on this new, growing field. In addition to these two technical books he has written four books for a general audience. Space and Time in Special Relativity (1968) and It’s About Time (2005) give unusual and quite different expositions of special relativity, using no mathematical tools beyond plane geometry and some very elementary algebra. Boojums All the Way Through (1990) and Why Quark Rhymes with Pork (2016) are collections of his popular essays and lectures. Mermin is well-known for his thirty "Reference Frame" columns commenting on physics and the practice of physics, that appeared in Physics Today between 1988 and 2009. All can be found in his quark-pork volume. His efforts to reconcile the two sides in the "science wars" of the 1990s met with more indignation than approval, from both factions. He has held dozens of named visiting lectureships throughout the United States and Europe. He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1985 to 1989; a member of the Executive Committee of the Cornell Materials Science Center, in the 1980s; a member of the advisory board of arXiv.org in the late 90s and early 00s, and at various times a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Physics, Physics in Perspective, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Mermin was a 1970 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a 1988 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a 1991 member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1989 he received the first Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, in 1994, the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, in 1997 Cornell’s Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2010 the Majorana "Best Person in Physics" Prize. In retirement he continues to write and lecture on quantum foundations, works very hard at the piano (struggling to master, for example, the Chopin G Minor Ballade), and collaborates with his wife Dorothy, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Emerita, on maintaining their house and the surrounding eight acres of gardens, meadows, and woodlands in the town of Dryden, New York, just outside of Ithaca. "N." stands for "Nathaniel", which the USA Patriot Act is slowly requiring the world to call him.
 
2Name:  Dr. Margaret Murnane
 Institution:  University of Colorado at Boulder
 Year Elected:  2015
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1959
   
 
Margaret Murnane is a Fellow of JILA and a Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of Colorado. She runs a joint, multi-disciplinary, research group with her husband, Prof. Henry Kapteyn. She received her B.S and M.S. degrees from University College Cork, Ireland, and her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. Prof. Murnane with her students and collaborators uses coherent beams of laser and x-ray light to capture the fastest dynamics in molecules and materials at the nanoscale. Margaret is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, and the AAAS. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and chaired the President’s Committee for the National Medal of Science for three years. She was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. She shared the 2009 Ahmed Zewail Award of the American Chemical Society, the 2010 Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society, and the 2010 R.W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America with her husband Henry Kapteyn. She received the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute. Margaret is very interested in increasing diversity in science and engineering.
 
Election Year
2015[X]