Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist and author.

Mlodinow was born in Chicago, Illinois, of parents who were both holocaust survivors. His father, who spent more than a year in the Buchenwald death camp, had been a leader in the Jewish resistance in his home town of Częstochowa, Poland. 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 beside read "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", which was the only English book he found in the kibbutz library.

While a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the faculty at Caltech, he developed (with N. 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 Astrophysik 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 wrote the screenplay for the film "Beyond the Horizon" (currently in production) and has been a scriptwriter for television series including "" and "MacGyver", and co-authored (with Matt Costello) a children's chapter book series entitled "The Kids of Einstein Elementary".

Mlodinow currently teaches at Caltech, and is working on a new 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.

Works

*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.
*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.
*A Briefer History of Time (ISBN 0-553-80436-7), with Stephen Hawking, an international best-seller that has appeared in 25 languages.
*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.

External links

* [http://www.its.caltech.edu/~len/ Homepage of Leonard Mlodinow]
*
* [http://www.universepartners.net/project_m.html About Mlodinow's Film "Beyond the Horizon"]
* [http://www.ams.org/notices/200205/fea-langlands.pdf A review of "Euclid's Window" by Robert Langlands ]
* [http://plus.maths.org/issue22/reviews/book4/index.html A review of "Euclid's Window" by Rachel Thomas ]
* [http://physicsweb.org/articles/review/16/11/2 PhysicsWeb Review of "Feynman's Rainbow"]
* [http://librarycog.uwindsor.ca:8082/artblog/librarycog/1084807392 Library Cog Review of "Feynman's Rainbow"]
* [http://onthesamepage.berkeley.edu/archive/2007-hawking/author.html About the Authors of A Briefer History of Time - UC Berkeley]
* [http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns286/dw_sum.html Abstract of The Drunkard's Walk - Caltech]
* [http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-10-04T175608Z_01_N04220546_RTRUKOC_0_US-HAWKING.xml About "The Grand Design"]