N. 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 on solid-state physics written with Neil Ashcroft, and his contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information science. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1956, graduating summa cum laude, and earned a doctorate in physics there in 1961. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Birmingham and the University of California, San Diego, he joined the Cornell faculty in 1964 and became professor emeritus in 2006. He was the first to note how the three-particle GHZ state shows that no local hidden-variable theory can explain quantum correlations.