Remembering Daniel C. Lewin

Those remembering victims of 9/11 have been asked to post their memorial a little early.

Remembering Daniel C. Lewin


We pledged never to forget them, and so now we take a moment to remember.

This is Daniel C. Lewin, who was 31.
Place killed: American Airlines Flight 11. He was a resident of Charlestown, Mass.

American Airlines Flight 11, from Boston, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, California, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center with 92 people on board.

Daniel C. Lewin was co-founder and chief technology officer at Akamai Technologies Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that produces technology equipment to facilitate online content delivery. He is survived by his wife and two sons. He founded Akamai in 1998 with scientist Tom Leighton and a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and business professionals. Lewin was responsible for the company's research and development strategy.

Those from his company remembered him this way:

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 Lewin Award for Best Masterworks Thesis Presentation at MIT. His master's thesis included some of the fundamental algorithms that make up the core of Akamai's services. He was a Ph.D. candidate in the Algorithms group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.

Previously, Danny worked at IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, Israel, where he was a full-time research fellow and project leader while simultaneously completing two undergraduate degrees at the Technion, Israel's premier technology university. In 1995, 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 that is used widely within IBM and in other companies such as AMD and SGS Thompson.

On a personal note, he had a deep affinity for speed and freedom, maintaining an avid interest in motorcycles, fast cars, and skiing. 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 most favorite word.