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Julius Sumner Miller was born in Billerica, Massachusetts the youngest of nine children. His father was Latvian, his Lithuanian mother spoke 12 languages.
Miller graduated with a Philosophy degree and a Master's in Physics from Boston University in 1933 but due to the Depression worked as a butler for a wealthy Boston doctor for the next two years. He married the doctor's maid, Alice Brown; they had no children, but he was to reach millions of children through his popular science programs.
After making over 700 job applications, he was offered a place in 1937 in the Physics Department of Dillard University, a private, African American liberal arts college in New Orleans. During World War II he worked as a civilian physicist for the U.S. Army Signal Corps while holding fellowships in physics at the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and was a Ford Foundation Fellow at UCLA. In 1950 he enrolled in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. where he was a student of Albert Einstein. He became a lifelong friend of Einstein and went on to amass a collection of Einstein memorabilia that included Einstein's birth certificate. Miller also taught at Princeton but disliked large institutions, leaving in 1952 to join the Physics Department at the then small El Camino College in Torrance, California (1952–1974), to maximum student enrollments due to his great popularity and where he was instantly recognizable by his casual hair and horn-rimmed spectacles.
Miller was intolerant of misspelled words and misplaced punctuation and often angered his colleagues because he charged the students of most faculty were not learning enough. During an interview in the 1940s, he stated that intellectual life in America was in trouble, a belief he held for the rest of his life.
"We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can't read, write or calculate. We don't have academic honesty or intellectual rigor. Schools have abandoned integrity and rigor."
From 1963 to 1986 he was the visiting lecturer for the Physics Department of the University of Sydney and from 1965 to 1985 at the US Air Force Academy.
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