Daniel Lewin

Daniel Mark Lewin was born on May 14, 1970, in Denver, Colorado, to a Jewish family. He was one of three brothers. He moved to Israel with his family at age 14 and spent the remainder of his childhood living in Jerusalem. He completed his secondary education at an ORT high school.

After finishing high school, Lewin was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, eventually becoming an officer. He rose to the rank of captain.

After his discharge, Lewin studied electronic engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa while working at IBM's research laboratory in the city. Despite his university studies, he became a full‑time research fellow and project leader. 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.

Lewin received a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude from the Technion and was named as the university's outstanding student in Computer Engineering in 1995. He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1996 to begin graduate studies toward a Ph.D at MIT. There, he and his advisor, 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.

Lewin was married and had two sons.