Early Life and Education
Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.
At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his parents' garage for a science fair project. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and in 1972 he held a lectureship at Princeton University.
During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced individual training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.
Read more about this topic: Michio Kaku
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