Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way. I studied, but not in a particularly efficient manner. I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre. In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I could manage only a single advanced degree. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.вЂ™s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of ChuвЂ™s were to follow the family tradition. Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison dвЂ™ГЄtre. There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system. In 1950, we settled in Garden City, New York, a bedroom community within commuting distance of Brooklyn Polytechnic. Louis in 1948 while my father taught at Washington University, and my younger brother completed the family in Queens shortly after my father took a position as a professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. My brothers and I were born as part of a typical nomadic academic career: my older brother was born in 1946 while my father was finishing at MIT, I was born in St. However, when my parents married in 1945, China was in turmoil and the possibility of returning grew increasingly remote, and they decided to begin their family in the United States. A generation earlier, my motherвЂ™s father earned his advanced degrees in civil engineering at Cornell while his brother studied physics under Perrin at the Sorbonne before they returned to China. M y father, Ju Chin Chu, came to the United States in 1943 to continue his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemical engineering, and two years later, my mother, Ching Chen Li, joined him to study economics. Share via Email: Steven Chu вЂ“ Biographical Share this content via Email.Share on LinkedIn: Steven Chu вЂ“ Biographical Share this content on LinkedIn.Tweet: Steven Chu вЂ“ Biographical Share this content on Twitter.Share on Facebook: Steven Chu вЂ“ Biographical Share this content on Facebook.

Steven share