Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist specializing in string field theory, and a futurist. He is a popularizer of science, host of two radio programs and a best-selling author.
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 graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a B.S. degree 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 held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973.
Kaku currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics and a joint appointment at City College of New York, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has lectured for more than 30 years. Presently, he is engaged in defining the "Theory of Everything", which seeks to unify the four fundamental forces of the universe: the strong force, the weak force, gravity and electromagnetism.
He has published extensively in string theory since 1969. In 1974, along with Prof. K. Kikkawa, he wrote the first paper on string field theory, now a major branch of string theory. He is also author of the popular science books: Visions, Hyperspace, Einstein's Cosmos, and Parallel Worlds, and co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson.
