Leonard Mlodinow
Leonard Mlodinow 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 beside 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.