Daniel "Danny" M. Lewin (1970 – September 11, 2001) was a mathematician and entrepreneur, best known for cofounding internet company Akamai Technologies.

Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado and raised in Jerusalem, Israel, where he served for four years in the Israel Defence Forces. He was an officer in Sayeret Matkal, a top-secret counter-terrorism 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 Thompson.

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 a set of novel algorithms for efficiently delivering large amounts of internet content; 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, his share of Akamai stock made him nearly a billionaire (at least on paper).

While still a Ph.D. candidate in the Algorithms group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, he died aboard American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, after allegedly being stabbed or shot. According to reports, Lewin was sitting in seat 9B, and was killed by the passenger in seat 10B at 9:20. That passenger in 10B has been identified as Satam al-Suqami.

Lewin was survived by his wife and two sons.

Awards

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

External links

• Akamai Remembers Danny Lewin (http://www.akamai.com/en/html/about/management_dl.html)
• Obituary from the MIT Alumni Association (http://alumweb.mit.edu/are-you-ok/lewin.shtml)
• UPI story (http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=06032002-121706-8744r)
• Danny Lewin Square (http://www.lcs.mit.edu/about/lewinsquare.html)