Leonard Mlodinow
Home Bio Books Pictures Teaching Links Contact Authors@Google talk on YouTube New York Times Interview New York Times Essay on the Need for Control Wall Street Journal Essay on Wine Ratings Wall Street Journal Essay on Hot Streaks and Joe DiMaggio Wall Street Journal Interview LA Times Magazine cover story on Randomness in Hollywood Newsweek cover story on Star Trek Wall Street Journal Drunkard's Walk Randomness Quiz Forbes article on The Meritocracy Paradox	BIOGRAPHY I was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1954. Both of my parents were holocaust survivors. My father was a leader in the Jewish underground in Czestochowa, Poland, until he was shipped to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. He was liberated by General Patton on April 11, 1945. At the time, he weighed 80 pounds. My mother was in a labor camp, also in Poland. They met in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948. I started my college education at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in 1972, but dropped out when the Yom Kippur War began in the Fall of 1973 and travelled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I returned to Brandeis the next school year and graduated in 1976 with a double major in math and physics, and a Masters degree in physics. I was also one course short of a third major, in chemistry, which had been my childhood love, but which I abandoned for physics after reading some of Richard Feynman's books that were the only English books in the kibbutz library. In 1981 I received my Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley. My advisor was Eyvind Wichmann, who worked on axiomatic quantum field theory. My dissertation was on a subject that was more practical, at least if you are a physicist - Nikos Papanicolaou and I developed a new approximation method in which you solve a problem in infinite dimensions, and then calculate corrections to account for the fact that we live in only three. For details, see these: "SO(2,1) Algebra and Large N Expansions in Quantum Mechanics," Annals of Physics 128, 314 (1980). With N. Papanicolaou. "Pseudo-spin Structure and Large N Expansions for a Class of Generalized Helium Hamiltonians," Annals of Physics 131, 1 (1981). With N. Papanicolaou. SO(2,1) Algebra and Large N Expansions in Quantum Mechanics," Annals of Physics 128, 314 (1980). With N. Papanicolaou. "Large N Expansions Work," in Proceedings of the IV Warsaw Symposium in Elementary Particle Physics. Z. Abjduk and K. Doroba, eds. (Warsaw, 1981). "Semi-Classical Perturbation Theory for the Hydrogen Atom in a Uniform Magnetic Field," Phys Rev A 25 1305 (1982). With C. Bender and N Papanicolaou. "A Semi-Classical Perturbation Theory for Quantum Mechanics," in Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics, volume 8, Quarks and the Nucleus . D Wilkerson, ed. (Pergamon, 1982). "Solving the Schroedinger Equation with Use of 1/N Perturbation Theory," J Math Phys 25 943 (1984). With M. Shatz. After graduating I joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, and then became an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, Germany. In this period I was interested in quantum field theories inside dielectrics. At the time, people created quantum theories of electromagnetic interactions in dielectrics by simply carrying over certain mathematical constructs from the vacuum, or empty-space, theory. With Mark Hillery, I showed that this is incorrect, and developed the correct procedure. See: "A Semi-Classical Expansion for Non-Linear Dielectric Media," Phys Rev A 31 797 (1985). With M. Hillery. "Quantization of Electrodynamics in Nonlinear Dielectric Media," Phys Rev A 30 1860 (1984). With M. Hillery. In 1985 I was bitten by the Hollywood bug and moved back to Los Angeles with $6000, a screenplay in my pocket, and no job. I managed to sell my first script six months later. At the time I had $110 left in the bank. Over the next several years I wrote for television series such as: Hunter, MacGyver, Star Trek: the Next Generation, and the comedy series Night Court, as well as for many others that I would mostly like to forget! Meanwhile I continued to conduct physics research as a hobby, working with my old friend Mark Hillery. See for instance: "Bounds from a Conservation Law in the Dicke Model," Phys Rev A 38 4064 (1988). "Improving Phase Measurement Accuracy with use of Minimum Uncertainty States". Phys Rev A (1993). "Quantized Fields in a Nonlinear Dielectric medium: A Microscopic Approach," Phys Rev A 55 678 (1997). In 1993 I joined those leaving the television and film business for computer gaming, and became producer, executive producer and designer of several award-winning games created in conjunction with Stephen Speilberg,Robin Williams, and the Walt Disney Company. Among the awards won by my games are the Consumer Electronics Software Showcase Award; Home PC Magazine Editor's Choice Award; and the National Association of Parenting Publications Gold Medal(twice). In 1997 I moved to New York, and between 1997 and 2003 was Vice President for software development and then Vice President and Publisher for math education at Scholastic Inc., the New York publisher of the Harry Potter series. As head of Scholastic software, I created a children's games division and built it into one of the top five in the United States. While at Scholastic I began to write popular science books, which by now have appeared in 25 languages. I also had the misfortune of being at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when the terrorists' planes flew into the buildings. As of Fall, 2005, I have come full circle, and am back teaching at Caltech. I also recently wrote the screenplay for an IMAX film, currently in production, called "Beyond the Horizon." The story is this: Olivia is a twenty-something reporter in 2005 assigned to the religion beat for the London Times. She is on deadline to write a feature story about cosmology and the meaning of existence on the 100th anniversary of Einstein's proposing the special theory of relativity. Olivia is scheduled to interview the "rock star" of cosmologists, Stephen Hawking. A skeptic when it comes to scientific facts, she firmly believes science holds no meaning for the Big Questions of life. The interview with Stephen Hawking leads to more than Olivia bargained for-a whirlwind journey through time and space, where deep space images explode onto the big screen and where the "Big Questions" are answered for Olivia and the audience with ease and whimsy. As of this time, my books include: The Grand Design (to appear in 2009), co-authored with Stephen Hawking. The Drunkard's Walk: the story of randomness and its role in our lives (May, 2008) A Briefer History of Time (2005), as co-author with Stephen Hawking. Feynman's Rainbow: a search for beauty in physics and in life (2003) Euclid's Window: The story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace (2001) and the children's books: The Last Dinosaur (2004), co-authored with Matt Costello Titanic Cat (2004), co-authored with Matt Costello	Latest Book: a New York Times bestseller, editor's choice, and notable book of 2008 Amazon.com "one of the Ten Best Science Books of 2008" Shortlisted for Royal Society Science Book Award Fortune Magazine review of Drunkard's Walk ("mind-bending") Barron's review of Drunkard's Walk ("intriguing and well-written") New York Times review of Drunkard's Walk ("writes in a breezy style... a readable crash course in randomness")