Eli Harari

Eli Harari was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to Avraham and Genia Harari, Polish Jews who had emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933; at thirteen he was sent to Whittingehame College, the Jewish boarding school in Brighton, and he later served in the Israeli Air Force. After a physics doctorate at Princeton on semiconductors he worked at Hughes Aircraft and Intel, patenting the thin-oxide floating-gate cell that made reliable electrically erasable memory possible. He founded SanDisk in 1988 with Sanjay Mehrotra and Jack Yuan and led it for over twenty years; the system-flash architecture it developed underlies the memory cards, USB drives and solid-state disks now used everywhere. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.