Tyson was born as the second of three children in the borough of Manhattan in New York City and was raised in the Bronx.[1]His mother, Sunchita Marie (Feliciano) Tyson, was agerontologist, and his father, Cyril deGrasse Tyson, was asociologist, human resource commissioner for the New York City mayor John Lindsay, and the first Director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited.[3][4]
From kindergarten through high school Tyson attended public schools in New York City, all in the Bronx, which included PS 36, PS 81, Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy (MS 141), and The Bronx High School of Science (1972–76)[5] where he was captain of the wrestling team, and editor-in-chief of the school's Physical Science Journal. Tyson had an abiding interest in astronomy since he was nine years old, following his visit to Pennsylvania and seeing the stars, saying "it looks like the Hayden Planetarium".[6] He obsessively studied astronomy in his teens, and eventually even gained some fame in the astronomy community by giving lectures on the subject at the age of fifteen.[7] Tyson recalls that "so strong was that imprint [of the night sky] that I'm certain that I had no choice in the matter, that in fact, the universe called me."[6]
Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was a faculty member at Cornell University, tried to recruit Tyson to Cornell forundergraduate studies.[3] In an interview with writer Daniel Simone,[8] Tyson said:
Interestingly, when I applied to Cornell, my application dripped of my passion for the study and research of the Universe. Somehow the admissions office brought my application to the attention of the late Dr. Sagan, and he actually took the initiative and care to contact me. He was very inspirational and a most powerful influence. Dr. Sagan was as great as the universe, an effective mentor.
Tyson revisited this moment on his first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Pulling out a 1975 calendar belonging to the famous astronomer, he finds the day Sagan invited his 17-year-old self to spend a day in Ithaca. Sagan had offered to put him up for the night if his bus back to the Bronx didn't come. Tyson said, "I already knew I wanted to become a scientist. But that afternoon, I learned from Carl the kind ofperson I wanted to become."[9][10]
Tyson chose to attend Harvard University, however, where he majored in physics and lived in Currier House. He was a member of the crew team during his freshman year, but returned to wrestling, eventually lettering in his senior year. In addition to wrestling and rowing in college, he was active in dance, in styles including jazz,ballet, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin Ballroom.[11] Tyson earned a Bachelor of Arts in physics from Harvard in 1980 and began his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin; he was unable to complete his Ph.D. because his thesis committee voted to dissolve itself[12] and he received a Master of Arts in astronomy in 1983. In 1985, he won a gold medal with the University of Texas dance team at a national tournament in the International Latin Ballroom style. He was a lecturer at the University of Maryland from 1986-1987.[13] In 1988, Tyson was accepted into the astronomy graduate program at Columbia University, where he earned aMaster of Philosophy in astrophysics in 1989, and a Doctor of Philosophy in astrophysics in 1991[14] under the supervision of Professor R. Michael Rich (now at UCLA). Rich obtained funding to support Tyson's doctoral research from NASA and the ARCS foundation[15] enabling Tyson to attend international meetings in Italy, Switzerland, Chile, and South Africa[13] and to hire students to help him with data reduction.[16] In the course of his thesis work, he observed using the 0.91 m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, where he obtained images for the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey[17][18][19] helping to further their work in establishing Type Ia Supernovae as standard candles. These papers comprised part of the discovery papers of the use of Type Ia supernovae to measure distances, which led to the improved measurement of the Hubble constant[20] and discovery of dark energy in 1998.[21][22] He was 18th author on a paper with Brian Schmidt, a future winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, in the study of the measurement of distances to Type II Supernovae and the Hubble constant.[23]
During his thesis work at Columbia University, Tyson became acquainted with Professor David Spergel atPrinceton University, who visited Columbia University in the course of collaborating with his thesis advisor on the Galactic bulge.[24][25][26] Tyson was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University from 1991 to 1994 and it was during this period that the project to renovate the Hayden Planetarium was conceived.