Matthew Sands

Matthew Sands
Matthew L. Sands Los Alamos ID badge photo
Born	(1919-10-20)October 20, 1919 Oxford, Massachusetts
Died	September 13, 2014(2014-09-13) (aged 94) Santa Cruz, California
Nationality	American
Fields	Accelerator physics
Institutions	Los Alamos National Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology California Institute of Technology Stanford Linear Accelerator Center University of California, Santa Cruz
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology Clark University Rice University
Thesis	The meson component of cosmic radiation (1948)
Doctoral advisor	Bruno Rossi
Known for	Co-author of The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Notable awards	Robert R. Wilson Prize (1998)

Matthew Linzee Sands (October 20, 1919 – September 13, 2014) was an American physicist and educator best known as a co-author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. A graduate of Rice University, Sands served with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

After the war, Sands studied cosmic rays for his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Bruno Rossi. Sands went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1950, and helped build and operate its 1.5 GeV electron synchrotron. He became deputy director for the construction and early operation of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1963. Sands later joined the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) as a professor of physics, and served as its Vice Chancellor for Science from 1969 to 1972. In 1998, The American Physical Society awarded him the Robert R. Wilson Prize "for his many contributions to accelerator physics and the development of electron-positron and proton colliders."

Matthew Linzee Sands was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, on October 20, 1919. His parents were Linzee Sands and Beatrice Goyette, both of whom were bookkeepers. He had a brother, Roger, and a sister, Claire, who was seven years younger. As a 12-year-old Boy Scout, Sands was motivated by his scoutmaster, who was a radio amateur, to build his own shortwave radio receiver. With the aid of information from the Radio Amateur's Handbook, he constructed it out of parts scavenged from old radios. He was encouraged to study mathematics and science by his high school math teacher, John Chafee, a graduate of Brown University.