Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents, and attended and played first board on the chess team of Cubberly High School in Palo Alto in the early 1960s. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, N.M., he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku received a B.S. degree summa cum laude from Harvard université in 1968 where he placed first in his physics class. He went on to attend the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the université of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D....