| 1 | Name: | 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. | |||