The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives

Randomness, change, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious cases, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.

Physicist Mlodinow will guide us through the mathematical laws of randomness and how they affect our daily lives.

Speaker Details

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist and writer. 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 Feynman’s 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 Star Trek: The Next Generation and MacGyver, and co-authored (with Matt Costello) a children’s chapter book series entitled “The Kids of Einstein Elementary.”

Date:
Speakers:
Leonard Mlodinow
Affiliation:
Physicist, California Institute of Technology