Your Memoir Matters

Last fall, Trevor Owens, the Chief Research Officer at the American Institute of Physics, made a plea to the Sigma Pi Sigma community: donate your memoirs! He wrote in the Sigma Pi Sigma publication, Radiations, about the importance of memoirs in the Niels Bohr Library and Archives collections, and about the ways they can enrich our knowledge of the physical sciences.

One of the first brave souls to respond was Dr. Michael F. Shlesinger, who donated his memoir, An Unbounded Experience in Random Walks with Applications , published in 2021 by World Scientific. This book follows his career in statistical physics, specifically looking at the applications of random walks , and is now available to borrow at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives. Shlesinger does not just explain his research, though - he also tracks his career at a variety of institutions. Switching between the development of his papers and personal stories, this memoir is neither a textbook nor an autobiography. Shlesinger melds all aspects of his life as a scientist, writing a unique and informative reflection on his professional journey. In addition to walking readers through his lifetime of work on stochastic processes, Shlesinger also recounts evolving from a curious graduate student to a respected colleague. He describes a multitude of knowledge and experiences, like co-founding the journal FRACTALS, as well as an introduction to the history of probability. The reader learns what it was like for him to plan his own conferences and what it was like to spend breaks traveling Europe.

Ultimately, Shlesinger wrote a guide to his career, imparting casual asides and tips alongside hearty mathematical theorems. It is easy to tell that this work is deeply meaningful to Shlesinger, as he finishes with, “I never had students so this book gave me the opportunity to pass on some knowledge and history that I would have liked to teach” (p. 189-190). He loved writing this memoir so much that he is finishing a follow-up autobiography, also with World Scientific, titled Why not Linear Algebra: Math, Science, Applications, and Funding, about his time at the ONR.

This is why donating to the Niels Bohr Library and Archives can be impactful for physicists and physical scientists; it provides a meaningful place to leave their life stories, ideas, beliefs, and more, where they know it will reach an interested and curious audience. Shlesinger’s career story not only illustrates that the journey of a career is important, but also that anyone can be an author if they make the effort. While Shlesinger’s memoir happens to be published by World Scientific, the majority of our manuscript biographies are unpublished, and unpublished works are equally as valuable to our collections. Please email us at nbl@aip.org to discuss contributing your story.

I got the opportunity to interview Dr. Shlesinger about the memoir, which I am grateful to be able to share with you here.

Rianna Ehrenreich: How did you decide on the balance between physics and life stories? Did you ever have to cut yourself down on one or the other?
Dr. Michael F. Shlesinger: Rather than reading like a physics textbook, I think it is interesting for the reader to be provided with a personal perspective of how one found a problem, its history and the path to making progress.  World Scientific Publishers was very supportive in giving me the freedom to find my own balance between physics and personal story telling.

RE: You reflected on a lot of pivotal moments where if you missed something or spoke to someone else then your entire career would have changed, such as Dr. Montrell telling you to work with Dr. Harvey Scher before he went on sabbatical (p. 143-144). Do you think it was fate or just good luck?
MS: It was preparation, neither fate nor luck.  As a graduate student, I devoted all of my time to learning more and more physics to hopefully find a good thesis problem.  I went to weekly seminars, read the journals, and sat in on advanced courses.  I do have papers on other topics, so it wasn’t luck, but a solid background.  So, I was prepared when Dr. Montroll asked me to connect with Dr. Scher about puzzling experimental results.  The key turned out to be introducing random variables with infinite moments.  If the mean moment was finite, then it would set a scale. Having an infinite moment thus produced scale invariance in a non-equilibrium system, a concept connected to fractals, which in my problem is called fractal time.

RE: What do you want students who aren’t confident in their physics abilities to know?
MS: My thesis advisor, Elliott Montroll, set a stress-free environment based on encouragement and the joy of discovery. There was no thought of competition, just work at your own pace. He thought a good measure of one’s ability was to fail on one problem and not get discouraged and move on to other topics.  Kind of like you want a general who can lose a battle but win a war. For a student, don’t be discouraged. Everyone feels that at some point. Mostly enjoy your work and there are many avenues of employment in physics, not just at universities.

RE: What do you think about the current state of research concerning probability and random walks? Do you have any predictions for upcoming applications?
MS: What is fun about probability is that there is no starting equation like one has with Electricity and Magnetism’s Maxwell equations or in quantum mechanics with Schrodinger’s equation. You only start with the condition that probability is positive and at most is equal to one. So, every new problem starts from scratch, and for random walks there are many open questions connected to chaos and fractals. There are no limits to the number of questions one can ask. Of course, random walks are only a small part of the field of probability and statistics. In any equation, one can let a parameter be noisy so any field of physics can make contact with probability.

RE: Are there any current projects/areas of interest that you’re thinking about, either with writing or physics?
MS: My book An Unbounded Experience… was a play on words for the book topic of unbounded random variables. My new book, Why Not Nonlinear Algebra, is about my 40 years at the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The title comes from a math department tea in 1968 when the Chairman, James Simons, asked me what I wanted to study. Taking a course in linear algebra, I said, multilinear algebra, and he replied [with] what I used as the book title.  At ONR, for 40 years, my program was nonlinear physics which indeed involved nonlinear algebra. Simons went on to found the first “quant” billion dollar “Renaissance” hedge fund.

RE: Did you have any difficulties while writing/publishing the book?
 MS: World Scientific Publishers was supportive and helpful throughout. Writing was very relaxing, fun, and an opportunity to acknowledge my mentors and colleagues. Also, I wanted to point out the tremendous support I received at Stony Brook [University] as an undergrad and at [the University of] Rochester as a grad student. At Stony Brook, in 1966, as a math major, I took freshman Physics from Arnold Strassenburg who was also the AIP Director of Education and Manpower. We used the Berkeley series of books and the Feynman Lectures for enrichment. His teaching was so good that I became a physics major.

RE: Do you have advice for other physicists who are toying with the idea of writing a memoir?
MS: I had been working with World Scientific Publishers since, in 1986, joining the Editorial Board for their International Journal of Modern Physics B, and then co-founding the journal Fractals in 1993. I wanted to show that a life in physics can be exciting and rewarding even if one is not famous. If one has an interesting story, then by all means write a memoir.