“It was about the way he lived,” she says. There were so many different elements, she says – his military service, his business leadership, his intellect, his savvy – and she wanted to convey some of that energy to others. That was partly due to his low-profile life and business – Akamai is an infrastructure company, and Lewin wasn’t flashy with his instant dot-com millions – and partly because his friends and family shied away from publicity.īut she believes it’s a life that deserves to be celebrated.Įven at 31, she says, he’d already accomplished so much. If you’ve never heard of Lewin, you’re not alone, says the book’s author, Molly Knight Raskin. His life is now the subject of a new biography, “ No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet.” He was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, and was almost certainly the first person killed in the attacks on that horrible day. Lewin died on September 11, 2001, at age 31. (Disclosure: CNN was an early Akamai client and remains one to this day.) Most importantly, in the late ’90s he saw a solution to what was then called the “World Wide Wait” and, with his company Akamai Technologies – co-founded with Leighton – made the Web faster and more efficient. He was a mathematician who could have had a stellar academic career but decided to jump into business. He was an American who joined the Israeli army and served in an elite unit, though he could have avoided the military altogether. That kind of determination drove Lewin throughout his short life. “He liked working on the hardest problems, as opposed to the easier ones, because they would make more of a difference.” ![]() MIT has a lot of really smart people, and Danny stood out even among that rarified environment,” says Leighton, who was then one of Lewin’s professors at the Massachusetts school’s computer science laboratory. Even by MIT standards, says Tom Leighton, Danny Lewin was special.
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