Not everyone knows that the first person killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks was an Israeli American man named Daniel Lewin, born in Denver, Colorado.
At 14, Lewin made aliyah to Israel. Finishing school, Lewin enlisted in the IDF’s elite counterterrorism unit, Sayeret Matkal.
Following his stint in the military, he worked full-time as a researcher at IBM in Haifa while also completing two undergraduate degrees at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
In 1995, the Technion named him the year’s Outstanding Student in Computer Engineering. At IBM, he was responsible for the development and support of the company’s Genesys system, a processor verification tool still used widely within IBM and in other companies.
Eventually, Lewin married Anne, and they had two sons, Itamar and Eitan.
Marco Greenberg, his best friend, shared an anecdote about Lewin on the IDF website: “Danny wore many different hats. If you can believe it, he was both a father changing diapers with his wife and a stellar student at the Technion, majoring in mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering.”
“He did reserve duty in Sayeret Matkal, the most elite Commando unit, and he would be correcting papers. When we had dinners at his apartment in Haifa, he would look at mistakes from other very bright students, and he would argue about politics – all of this at the same time.”
Co-founding Akamai Technologies
In 1996, Daniel received a scholarship to MIT for his PhD. According to publicly available information, he continued his research and wrote an algorithm that would forever change the internet: a practical use for the concept of “consistent hashing,” enabling websites to handle higher user traffic.
In 1998, together with his professor Tom Leighton and other partners, he co-founded Akamai Technologies and became a millionaire before reaching his 30s.
Lewin confronts Al-Qaeda hijackers on 9/11 flight
On 9 September 2001, aged 31, Lewin was travelling on American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles for work.
According to an FBI report, the 9/11 Commission and flight attendant records, Lewin confronted Al-Qaeda hijackers in front of him and tried to stop them but was slashed in the throat by Satam al-Suqami, a hijacker sitting behind him. Shortly after his killing, the plane was forced to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
The IDF website noted that even in the immediate hours after his killing, Lewin’s legacy was significant. After the planes hit the Twin Towers, thousands of people went onto the internet to see if their relatives had survived. The websites of federal institutions, newspapers, and others began crashing due to heavy user traffic, and the company they reached out to was Akamai Technologies.
Today, Akamai is the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) and cloud security services. It is said to deliver tens of millions of transactions every second on behalf of the world’s largest brands, including Airbnb, Apple, BMW, eBay, FedEx, Ford Motor Co., Fox, NASDAQ, NBC Olympics, PayPal, and Salesforce.com.
Lewin is named on 25 US patents.
Akamai has a permanent eulogy to Lewin on its website.
“First and foremost, Danny was known for his brilliance. He published and presented several breakthrough papers at top computer science conferences and received several awards, including the 1998 Morris Joseph Levin Award for Best MasterWorks Oral Thesis Presentation at MIT [an honor given by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to graduate students for exceptional thesis presentations],” it reads.
“Everyone who knew Danny knew a man who was always on the go, deeply driven, and incredibly competitive. He inspired everyone around him to work at their very best, never taking no for an answer and calling anything that got in his way obstreperous, his favorite word.”
