He has also written books for the general public, five of which have been New York Times best-sellers, including The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which was chosen as a New York Times notable book, and short-listed for the Royal Society Science Book Prize; The Grand Design, co-authored with Stephen Hawking, which argues that invoking God is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe; War of the Worldviews, co-authored with Deepak Chopra; and Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, which won the 2013 PEN/E.

He also makes public lectures and media appearances on programs including Morning Joe and Through the Wormhole, and debated Deepak Chopra on ABC's Nightline.

His father, who spent more than a year in the Buchenwald concentration camp, had been a leader in the Jewish resistance in his hometown of Częstochowa, in Nazi Germany-occupied Poland.

It was in that PhD dissertation that he developed a new type of perturbation theory for nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, based upon solving the problem in infinite dimensions, and then correcting for the fact that we live in three.

Later, he was named an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, Germany.