In Memoriam: Matthew Sands

Matthew Linzee Sands, professor emeritus of physics who was instrumental in establishing Kresge College, died September 13 in Santa Cruz, five weeks shy of his 95th birthday.

Sands joined UC Santa Cruz as a professor of physics and served as its vice chancellor for science from 1969 to 1972.

He was born in Oxford, Mass. and received a B.A. in physics and mathematics from Clark University, an M.A. in physics from Rice University, and—after interruption by World War II—his Ph.D. from MIT. Sands worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project and, after the war, was heavily invested in making sure nuclear weapons were never used again.

He is well known as an author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, textbook material that continues to be used today and he was a co-founder of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally called the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

An obituary prepared by his family was published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.