Cultural Diversity Roster

Dr. Mlodinow was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1954. Both of his parents were holocaust survivors. His 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. His mother was in a labor camp, also in Poland. They met in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948.

Dr. Mlodinow started his college education at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in 1972, but dropped out when the Yom Kippur War began in the Fall of 1973, traveling to Israel to work on a kibbutz. While there, he fell in love with physics after reading some of Richard Feynman’s books, which were the only English books in the kibbutz He returned to Brandeis the next school year and added a physics major to his double major in chemistry and math. He graduated in 1976, and in 1981 received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley. His advisor was Eyvind Wichmann, who worked on axiomatic quantum field theory. His dissertation was on a subject that was more practical, at least if you are a physicist – Nikos Papanicolaou and Dr. Mlodinow 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.

After graduating, Dr. Mlodinow obtained a faculty position at the California Institute of Technology as Bantrell Research Fellow in Theoretical Physics. He then became an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, Germany. In this period he 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, he showed that this is incorrect, and developed the correct procedure.

In 1985 Dr. Mlodinow was bitten by the Hollywood bug and moved back to Los Angeles with $6000, a screenplay in his pocket, and no job. He managed to sell his first script six months later. At the time he had $110 left in the bank. Over the next several years he 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 he would mostly like to forget. Meanwhile he has continued to conduct physics research as a hobby.

In 1993 Dr. Mlodinow 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 his 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 he moved to New York, and between 1997 and 2003 he 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, he created a children’s games division and built it into one of the top five in the United States.

While at Scholastic he wrote his first popular science books, Euclid’s Window: The story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace, which has now appeared in 16 languages. He also had the misfortune of being at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when the terrorists’ planes flew into the buildings.

His book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, was a New York Times editor’s choice and a New York Times notable book of the year and won the Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical thinking and the Liber Press (Spain) Award for the Popularization of Science, in addition to being short-listed for the Royal Society book award. The Grand Design, co-authored with Stephen Hawking, was a #1 best seller, and was made into a three-part documentary on the Discovery Channel. He is also the co-author, with Deepak Chopra, of War of the Worldviews: Science and Spirituality, and three other books, which have appeared in 25 languages.

In addition, Dr. Mlodinow has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Nature, Discover Magazine, Wired, The New York Review of Books, Psychology Today, and other mass-market publications. He has appeared in films such as Jeff Bridges’ documentary Living in the Future’s Past, and on numerous television programs including Morning Joe, and Through the Wormhole. He has also created several award-winning video games, including one in conjunction with Steven Spielberg, and one starring Robin Williams, and has written for network television, including the series MacGyver, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the comedy Night Court. He is a popular international speaker who has given invited lectures on four continents, at universities such as Caltech and Harvard, and corporations ranging from Google and Microsoft to Pepsi and Major League baseball. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology.