• The Treaty of San Francisco, between Japan and part of the Allied Powers, is officially signed by 48 nations at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco (signing pictured, right)
 • Stanford Industrial Park in Palo Alto is completed
 • A Trader Vic's opens in San Francisco
 • Nuclear scientist Glenn T. Seaborg (pictured, left) at the University of California, Berkeley shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Edwin McMillan for "discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements."
 • The USS Independence is scuttled near the Farallon Islands, after being used as a target for the Operation Crossroads nuclear test at Bikini Atoll