Daniel Lewin, an American-Israeli mathematician and entrepreneur, was the Sayeret Matkal agent on board American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11 attacks.[1] [2] [3]

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Lewin was born on May 14, 1970, in Denver, Colorado, and moved to Israel with his family at age 14, where he completed his secondary education in Jerusalem.[1] [4] After high school, he was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, eventually rising to the rank of captain.[1] [5] Sayeret Matkal is the special reconnaissance unit of Israel's General Staff, known for its deep reconnaissance, counterterrorism, and hostage rescue operations, and is considered one of Israel's premier special forces units.[5] [6] [7]

After his military service, Lewin studied electronic engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and worked at IBM's research laboratory, where he developed the Genesys system.[1] [8] He later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT, where he and his advisor, Professor F. Thomson Leighton, developed consistent hashing, an algorithm to optimize Internet traffic.[1] [9] These algorithms formed the basis for Akamai Technologies, which they co-founded in 1998.[1] [8] Lewin served as the company's chief technology officer and a board member.[1]

On September 11, 2001, Lewin was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, traveling to a business meeting in Los Angeles.[1] [10] It is widely believed that he was stabbed to death by one of the hijackers, Satam al-Suqami, after attempting to thwart the hijacking, making him the first victim of the September 11 attacks.[1] [2] [3] [11] The 9/11 Commission Report indicates that Lewin was likely stabbed by al-Suqami, who was seated directly behind him.[1] [12] Flight attendants reported that Lewin's throat was slashed.[1] [13] Given his background as an Israeli military veteran, the 9/11 Commission speculated that Lewin may have attempted to confront the hijackers.[1] [12]

Lewin's legacy is honored in several ways, including the renaming of the intersection of Main and Vassar Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Danny Lewin Square, and the establishment of the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC).[1] [9] [14] His contributions to the internet were also memorialized on the tenth anniversary of his death.[1] [15] [16]

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