b. 1935 · American solid-state physicist · Cornell University
N. David Mermin (born 30 March 1935 in New Haven, Connecticut) is Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus at Cornell, where he joined the faculty in 1964. He is best known to students as half of Solid State Physics, the Ashcroft & Mermin textbook, and to physicists for the Hohenberg–Mermin–Wagner theorem and for importing the word boojum from Lewis Carroll into condensed-matter physics. He also wrote thirty “Reference Frame” columns for Physics Today between 1988 and 2009 — one of which produced the most famous sentence about quantum mechanics he never gets credit for.