Danny Lewin grew up in Denver, Colorado. At the age
After his army duty, Danny enrolled in the Technion,
where he double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics.
In 1996,
he came to MIT to study Theoretical Computer Science.
During his first year at MIT, Danny quickly
distinguished himself as a star student. In addition to taking
courses and
serving as my Teaching Assistant, Danny co-authored several papers
in
algorithms and complexity theory, two of which were later published
in STOC
and FOCS. One of these papers was on the problem of distributing
web
content in the internet. As part of this work, Danny discovered
consistent
hashing, which is a very elegant and useful way of hashing in distributed
networks. His Master's Thesis on this subject later won the best
thesis
prize in EECS at MIT.
In the Fall of 1997, Danny got the idea of writing a
business plan based on his thesis work and enterring it in MIT's $50K
Contest. Danny thought it would be a good idea to have someone
with gray
hair on the 50K team and so he talked me into doing it with him.
He used to
joke that the prize money would be his best chance to pay off his mounting
student loans.
As it turned out, we didn't win the $50K--in fact,
we lost to a nonprofit business plan--but we did learn alot about the
potential applications of our work on content delivery, and we did
talk to
alot of potential customers, partners, and venture capitalists.
And, by the
Fall of 1998, we decided to form a company called Akamai Technologies,
whose
mission was to use algorithms to make the web work better.
Danny was Akamai's first President and its central
driving force. During our first year in business, Danny worked
15-20 hours
every day doing anything and everything to make Akamai successful.
As a
direct result of his tremendous creativity and drive, the web really
does
work better today. Akamai currently serves over 10 Billion hits
per day and
it carries 5-20% of all web traffic, including just about every major
event
with a large web audience. Through danny's vision and tireless
efforts,
Akamai is also the leading pioneer in the next generation of web services
and distributed applications.
By 2001, Danny was widely recognized as one of the
most influential technologists of his generation. One well-known
trade
publication ranked him as the seventh most important technologist in
the
world, one notch behind Steve Ballmer and several notches ahead of
Bill
Gates, Larry Ellison, and Marc Andreessen.
Danny was killed on September 11. He was on
American Flight 11 on his way to meetings in California when his plane
was
hijacked. In true Danny form, he fought back against the terrorists
in an
effort to defend the stewardesses and the cockpit. To this day,
those of us
who knew him well can't figure out how only five terrorists managed
to
overpower him.
During his short life, Danny made extraordinary
contributions to the internet and to computer science through his work
in
algorithms and complexity theory. The impact of his work will
be felt
throughout the hi-tech industry for many years to come. Danny's
success in
transforming the way that the web works has also brought substantial
credit
and respect to our field from a wide cross-section of the technical
community.
Danny Lewin was a truly remarkable human being. The
naming of the STOC Best Student Paper Award in his honor will be a
lasting
tribute to his memory and a fitting reminder of his extraordinary
accomplishments.