David Sherrington FRS is a British theoretical physicist and Wykeham Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Oxford.
David Sherrington was born in Blackpool, England in 1941 and grew up in Yorkshire.
Perhaps his best known contribution is the 1975 invention, with Scott Kirkpatrick, of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of a spin glass.
The importance of the model stems from the fact that it was subsequently shown, in work by Giorgio Parisi, to be exactly solvable for its thermal equilibrium properties.
Sherrington has made numerous subsequent contributions to replica theory and the theory of spin glasses, and is also notable for his work on complex systems including the minority game (a model of market competition) and early work on the application of statistical mechanics to network theory.