page_title: Mendel Sachs
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Mendel Sachs / Biography / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: The Powell Library building, University of California, Los Angeles
context_page_description: Mendel Sachs was an American theoretical physicist. His scientific work includes the proposal of a unified field theory that brings together the weak force, strong force, electromagnetism, and gravity.
context_section_description: Sachs was born in Portland, Oregon, the third son of a rabbi. When just four months old, Sachs moved with his family to Toronto, Canada, where he grew up and attended school.
  In March 1945, when Sachs was 17 years old, he enlisted to serve in the US Navy during World War II. The Sachs family moved back to the United States to Los Angeles where other family members had already moved from Portland. From middle of 1945 onward, Sachs considered Los Angeles to be his hometown. After the war, in August 1945 Sachs enrolled in the Navy Eddy program in Chicago learning about electronics and radar equipment. He was then assigned to an aircraft carrier based in San Francisco that had been badly damaged in the war by a kamikaze airplane. In July 1946 Sachs spoke with the executive officer of the ship, explaining that he wanted to go to college and study physics and received an early honorable discharge from the Navy in August 1946.
  Sachs earned his bachelors at the University of California, Los Angeles, he then moved to Columbia University, New York for postgraduate study. Sachs had heard of the research at Columbia University while at UCLA. During that time Columbia's physics department was chaired by Isidor Isaac Rabi and was home to two Nobel laureates (Rabi and Enrico Fermi) and seven future laureates (Polykarp Kusch, Willis Lamb, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, James Rainwater, Norman Ramsey, Charles Townes and Hideki Yukawa) While at Columbia Sachs was taught by Willis Lamb and Hideki Yukawa. Yukawa had agreed to be Sach's thesis advisor, but Sachs decided to complete his doctorate back at UCLA so that he could be reunited with Yetty Herman, whom he married in 1952.
caption: Powell Library, UCLA. Sachs completed his AB, MA and PhD at UCLA.
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