Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow
Born	1954 Chicago, Illinois
Citizenship	American
Fields	Mathematical physics
Institutions	Max Planck Institute for Physics California Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Brandeis University University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Eyvind Wichmann
Known for	Perturbation theory Quantum field theory
Influences	Richard Feynman

Leonard Mlodinow (pronunciation: /məˈlɒdᵻnoʊf/) is an American physicist, author and screenwriter.

Mlodinow was born in Chicago, Illinois, of parents who were both Holocaust survivors. His father, who spent more than a year in the Buchenwald concentration camp, had been a leader in the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule in his hometown of Częstochowa, Poland then Generalgouvernement (für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete). As a child, Mlodinow was interested in both mathematics and chemistry, and while in high school was tutored in organic chemistry by a professor from the University of Illinois.

As recounted in his book, Feynman's Rainbow, his interest turned to physics during a semester he took off from college to spend on a kibbutz in Israel, during which he had little to do at night besides reading The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which was one of the few English books he found in the kibbutz library.

While a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the faculty at Caltech, he developed (with Nikos Papanicolaou) a new type of perturbation theory for eigenvalue problems in quantum mechanics. Later, as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, Germany, he did pioneering work (with M. Hillery) on the quantum theory of dielectric media.

Apart from his research and books on popular science, he also co-wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film Beyond the Horizon and has been a screenwriter for television series, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and MacGyver. He co-authored (with Matt Costello) a children's chapter book series entitled The Kids of Einstein Elementary.

Between 2008 and 2010, Mlodinow worked on a book with Stephen Hawking, entitled The Grand Design. A step beyond Hawking's other titles, The Grand Design is said to explore both the question of the existence of the universe and the issue of why the laws of physics are what they are.

His Ph.D. thesis written at UC Berkeley in 1981 is titled The Large N Expansion In Quantum Mechanics.

Works

• Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (ISBN 03-07-378217) Describes how things that we think are conscious, freely made choices, are in fact governed by our subconscious.
• The War of the Worldviews (ISBN 978-0-30-788688-0) with Deepak Chopra. From their contrasting scientific and spiritual perspectives, the two authors answer the big questions about the universe, consciousness, life, and God.
• The Grand Design (ISBN 0-553-80537-1) with Stephen Hawking. It argues that invoking God is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe and became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.
• The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (ISBN 0-375-42404-0), deals with randomness and people's inability to take it into account in their daily lives. The book was a bestseller, and a "NY Times notable book of the year" and was named "one of the 10 best science books of 2008" on Amazon.com.
• A Briefer History of Time (ISBN 0-553-80436-7), with Stephen Hawking, an international best-seller that has appeared in 25 languages.
• Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life (as published in USA) (ISBN 0-446-53045-X), is about his relationship with Richard Feynman, during his post-doctoral years in Caltech, in the early eighties. The book offers an insight into Feynman's attitude towards physics and life, his relationship with Murray Gell-Mann and the rise of String Theory.
• Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace (ISBN 0-684-86523-8) is a work on popular science that chronicles the idea of curved space and the history of geometry. It proved a popular success and has now been translated into ten languages.
• The Kids of Einstein Elementary: Titanic Cat, co-authored with Matt Costello and Josh Nash (2004) (ISBN 0-439-53774-6)
• The Kids of Einstein Elementary: The Last Dinosaur, co-authored with Matt Costello and Josh Nash (2004) (ISBN 0-439-53773-8)

Awards and honors

• 2013 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, Subliminal

External links

• Homepage of Leonard Mlodinow
• Leonard Mlodinow at the Internet Movie Database
• PhysicsWeb Review of "Feynman's Rainbow"
• Library Cog Review of "Feynman's Rainbow"
• About the Authors of A Briefer History of Time – UC Berkeley
• About "The Grand Design"
• Fortune Magazine Review of The Drunkard's Walk
• NY Times Review of The Drunkard's Walk
• Barron's Book Review of The Drunkard's Walk