Daniel Lewin

Origins and early life

Daniel Mark Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado, on 14 May 1970, the son of Charles Lewin, a psychiatrist, and Peggy Lewin, a paediatrician. Seeking to deepen their Jewish identity, his parents moved the family to Israel in 1984, when Danny was fourteen, and settled in Jerusalem, a move his father said gave a sense of purpose to their lives as Jews.

Work and career

He served for more than four years as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the Sayeret Matkal unit, and in 1991 he married Anne Pardes, with whom he had two sons, Eitan and Itamar. He completed two undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science at the Technion in Haifa while working full time at IBM's research laboratory in the city, where he developed Genesys, a processor verification tool used across IBM and by companies such as AMD.

In 1995 the Technion named him its outstanding student in computer engineering, and he went on to graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mathematician Tom Leighton.

Recognition

There he wrote a set of algorithms he called consistent hashing, and with Leighton he devised methods to replicate and deliver web content over a large network of distributed servers, work that won an MIT thesis award in 1998. The two men founded Akamai Technologies in August 1998, with Lewin as chief technology officer, to make the internet fast and reliable by spreading the delivery of content across those servers.

On 11 September 2001 he was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles and was killed by one of the hijackers; the 9/11 Commission found that he may have tried to stop them. He was 31 years old, and in 2017 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the methods behind Akamai, protected by United States patent 6,108,703.