Daniel Lewin

Daniel Mark Lewin (; May 14, 1970 – September 11, 2001) was an American-Israeli mathematician and entrepreneur who co-founded Akamai Technologies. A passenger on board American Airlines Flight 11, it is believed that Lewin was stabbed to death by Satam al-Suqami, one of the hijackers of that flight, making him the first victim of the September 11 attacks.

Early life

Lewin was born on May 14, 1970, in Denver, Colorado, and moved to Israel with his parents at age 14, where he spent the remainder of his childhood.

Career

Lewin served for four years in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as an officer in Sayeret Matkal, one of the IDF's special forces units. Lewin earned the rank of captain.

He attended the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa while simultaneously working at IBM's research laboratory in the city. While at IBM, he developed the Genesys system, a processor verification tool widely used within IBM and in other companies such as Advanced Micro Devices and SGS-Thomson.

After 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 MIT (MIT) in 1996. While there, he and his advisor, Professor F. Thomson Leighton, developed consistent hashing, an algorithm for optimizing Internet traffic. These algorithms became the basis for Akamai Technologies, which they founded in 1998. Lewin was the company's chief technology officer and a board member, and accumulated substantial wealth during the Internet boom.

Death and legacy

Lewin was reportedly stabbed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 during its hijacking in the September 11 attacks while traveling to a business meeting in Los Angeles. A 2001 FAA memo suggests he may have been stabbed by Satam al-Suqami after attempting to thwart the hijacking. According to the memo, Lewin was seated in business class in seat 9B, near hijackers Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari and al-Suqami. Initial reports indicated that he had been shot by al-Suqami, but the final draft of the memo omitted all references to gunfire.

According to ''9/11 Commission Report'', Lewin was stabbed by one of the hijackers, likely Satam al-Suqami, who was seated directly behind him. Flight attendants who contacted airline officials from the plane reported that Lewin's throat was slashed, presumably by the terrorist sitting behind him.

The 9/11 Commission speculated that Lewin, who had served four years in the Israeli military, may have attempted to confront Atta or Omari, who had been seated in front of him, unaware that al-Suqami was sitting just behind him. Lewin was identified as the first victim of the September 11 attacks.

Lewin was survived by his wife Anne and his two sons, Eitan and Itamar, who were five and eight years old, respectively, at the time of the attacks.

In July 2004, it was reported that Lewin's recovered remains had been identified.

Canadian actor Brad Hampton portrayed Lewin in the BBC docudrama '' Zero Hour'' Season 1: Episode 2 (2004) called "The Last Hour of Flight 11".

After his death, the intersection of Main and Vassar Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was renamed Danny Lewin Square in his honor. The award for the best student-written paper at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) was also named the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award, in his honor. In 2011, on the tenth anniversary of his death, Lewin's contributions to the internet were memorialized by friends and colleagues.

At the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Lewin is memorialized at the North Pool, on Panel N-75.

Lewin is the subject of the 2013 biography ''No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet'' by Molly Knight Raskin. According to Raskin, "Because of Akamai, almost every major news site remained up and running n September 11 a feat that proved everything Danny promised to be possible".

Awards

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

References

External links

Consistent hashing for relieving hot spots on the world wide web
Akamai Technologies.


Ynetnews.

The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications, Erik Nygren, Ramesh K. Sitaraman, and Jennifer Sun, ACM SIGOPS ''Operating Systems Review'', Vol. 44, No.3, July 2010.
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lewin, Daniel M.
American Airlines Flight 11 victims
1970 births
2001 deaths
American computer scientists
American emigrants to Israel
Murdered American Jews
21st-century American Jews
IBM employees
Deaths by stabbing in New York (state)
Israeli computer scientists
Israeli terrorism victims
Businesspeople from Denver
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Naturalized citizens of Israel
People from Cambridge, Massachusetts
Israeli soldiers
Terrorism deaths in New York (state)
Victims of the September 11 attacks
People murdered in New York City
21st-century Israeli Jews
Burials at Sharon Memorial Park, Massachusetts
Akamai Technologies people
21st-century American scientists
21st-century Israeli mathematicians
21st-century Israeli military personnel
21st-century American mathematicians