Daniel Lewin

Daniel "Danny" Mark Lewin (דניאל (דני) מארק לוין); (May 14, 1970 – September 11, 2001) was a mathematician and entrepreneur, best known for co-founding internet company Akamai Technologies.

Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado and raised in Jerusalem. He served for four years in the Israel Defence Forces as an officer in Sayeret Matkal, an elite and secretive unit.

He attended the Technion university in Haifa, Israel while simultaneously working at IBM's research laboratory in Haifa. While at IBM, he was responsible for developing the Genesys system, a processor verification tool that is used widely within IBM and in other companies such as AMD and SGS-Thomson.

Upon receiving a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude, in 1995, he traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts to begin graduate studies toward a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. While there, he and his advisor, Professor F. Thomson Leighton, came up with innovative algorithms for optimizing Internet traffic. These algorithms became the basis for Akamai, which the two founded in 1998. Lewin served as the company's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and a board member, and during the height of the internet boom achieved great wealth. He was posthumously named one of the most influential figures of the Internet age.

Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11, 2001 attacks, apparently toward the beginning of the hijacking. A 2002 FAA memo suggests he may have been killed by hijacker Satam al-Suqami after he attempted to foil the hijacking. According to the FAA, Lewin was seated in business class in seat 9B, close to hijackers Mohammed Atta and Satam al Suqami (who was possibly seated behind him). It was first reported that he had been shot by al Suqami, which was later changed to being stabbed. According to Zero Hour, Lewin may have been stabbed in the throat.

After his death, the intersection of Main and Vassar Streets in Cambridge was renamed "Danny Lewin Square" in his honor. The award given to the best student-authored paper at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) was named after him as the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award.

Awards

 * 1995 - Technion named him the year's Outstanding Student in Computer Engineering.
 * 1998 - Morris Joseph Levin Award for Best Masterworks Thesis Presentation at MIT.