The Kansas City Public Library welcomes Leonard Mlodinow for a presentation based on his book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives on Thursday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m. at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St.

The Drunkard's Walk presents a compelling case for the predominant influence of chance in our daily lives—explaining away the success of a favorite actor or sports superstar as dependent on happy accidents while undermining the value of wine ratings, political polls, and even high school GPAs. Along the way, the author offers highly readable insights into Bayesian statistics and the Monty Hall problem as well as short biographies of theorists like Blaise Pascal, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Pierre-Simon de Laplace.

Mlodinow proposes a radically different but statistically probable perspective on life, which he describes as an unexpected journey that is as predictable as the steps of a stumbling man fresh from a night at the bar.

Mlodinow is a CalTech physicist whose other works include A Briefer History of Time (co-authored with Stephen Hawking), Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, and Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and Life. He has also written television screenplays for Star Trek: The Next Generation and MacGyver.