Nathaniel David Mermin

Nathaniel David Mermin (; born 30 March 1935) is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Hohenberg–Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term "boojum" to superfluidity, his textbook with Neil Ashcroft on solid-state physics, and for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information science.

Education and career Mermin was born in 1935 in New Haven, Connecticut. He obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1956, graduating summa cum laude. He remained at Harvard for his graduate studies, earning a PhD in physics in 1961. After holding postdoctoral positions at the University of Birmingham and the University of California, San Diego, he joined the Cornell University faculty in 1964. and together with Asher Peres, he introduced the "magic square" proof, another demonstration that attempting to "complete" quantum mechanics with hidden variables does not work. Richard Feynman described another paper by Mermin in this area as "one of the most beautiful papers in physics". In collaboration with Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, he made a significant early contribution to quantum cryptography. Starting in 2012, he has advocated the interpretation of quantum mechanics known as Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism.

In 2003, the journal Foundations of Physics published a bibliography of Mermin's writing that included three books, 125 technical articles, 18 pedagogical articles, 21 general articles, 34 book reviews, and 24 "Reference Frame" articles from Physics Today.

Mermin was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1969, and he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He was also elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2015.

In his book It's About Time (2005), one of several expository pieces on special relativity, he suggests that the English foot (0.3048 meters) be slightly modified to approximately 0.2998 m. This adaptation of a physical unit is one of several ploys that Mermin uses to draw students into spacetime geometry. In the book, Mermin writes:

Though it is often misattributed to Richard Feynman, Mermin coined the phrase "shut up and calculate!" to characterize the views of many physicists regarding the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Books 1968: Space and Time in Special Relativity, McGraw Hill 1976: (with Neil Ashcroft) Solid State Physics, Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1990: Boojums All the Way Through, Cambridge University Press 2005: It's About Time: Understanding Einstein's Relativity, Princeton University Press 2007: Quantum Computer Science, Cambridge University Press 2016: Why Quark Rhymes with Pork: and Other Scientific Diversions, Cambridge University Press