Leonard Mlodinov

Leonard Mlodinow is an American physicist and science popularizer.

He was born in 1954 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. His parents survived the Holocaust. His father, who spent more than a year in the Buchenwald concentration camp, was the leader of the Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied territories in his hometown of Częstochowa, Poland. His mother was a prisoner in a labor camp. His parents met in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948.

As a child, Leonard was interested in mathematics and chemistry; while still in school, he took an interest in organic chemistry at lectures by professors from the University of Illinois.

In 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, he went to Israel for a semester to work on a kibbutz and read Feynman Lectures on Physics at night, one of the few books in English available in the kibbutz library.

Mlodinow then studied in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, and later worked in scientific research at the California Institute of Technology.

He is the author of several popular science books, including books for children, and also the creator of texts for television popular science programs.