No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet

“. . . a necessary tribute to an extraordinary man . . .”

Stand at a busy intersection in any large city and ask the first 100 people you see, “Who was Danny Lewin?”

If you are standing in the business district, you might find 15 people who recognize the name. Ask the question at a shopping mall, and there might be only one. Ask the question of a class of computer science majors at any university, and every student should recognize his name and what he did. Any student who fails to answer the question correctly deserves to fail. Danny Lewin and what he accomplished is that important.

Had Danny Lewin not died at the age of 31 at the hands of a terrorist, his name might be mentioned in the same breath as Einstein. Perhaps it should be. Without the algorithms written by this mathematical genius, the World Wide Web might still be known as the World Wide Wait, as websites crashed under the weight of too much data or content for its infrastructure to handle. “The fix lay somewhere in the nexus of the network of networks—the ill defined, tangled, seemingly infinite wilderness of the Internet.”

When Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, walked down the hall to the office of Tom Leighton, head of TCS, or Theoretical Computer Science, at MIT, to ask if Dr. Leighton and his grad students could come up with a fix for the internet’s problem, he unknowingly unleashed the astonishing intellect of Danny Lewin.

Danny Lewin was an American raised until he was fourteen in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. Then his father, determined to “make Aliyah,” or immigrate to Israel, moved the family, over Danny and his brothers’ vociferous objections. While in Israel Danny joined the army and was accepted by Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s most elite counterterrorism unit.

After leaving the army Danny and his wife moved to Haifa where Danny attended Technion. It was there that Danny read Tom Leighton’s book on the topic of parallel algorithms. “Lewin became fixated on the book and its author. . . .”

Lewin and Anne moved back to the United States, and Danny enrolled at MIT. His classmates “didn’t know much about Lewin’s army service besides the various snippets he shared, but they figured he was likely the first computer scientist at MIT to have fought face to face with terrorists.” His time in Sayeret Matkal would not mark the last time that Danny would face terrorists.

Under pressure to publish or perish Danny focused on “using math to relieve the congestion plaguing the complex architecture of the Internet.” His idea was consistent hashing, which he called “a pathetic idea, but it’s my idea.”

His idea of consistent hashing—which author Raskin explains clearly enough that the layperson can more or less understand it—was not a pathetic notion. Refined it became the algorithm upon Danny, Tom Leighton, and their associates wrote software to fix the World Wide Wait.

The latter half of the book describes the struggle to turn Danny’s idea into a business, Akamai Technologies, that promises to fix the Internet. It works, but the nonbusiness person learns that startup businesses, particularly those selling a service no one is sure will work, demand almost inhuman dedication by their founders, and a workload that will break anyone not so dedicated.

From a struggle to avoid bankruptcy to an overnight billionaire, Danny’s life seems a Cinderella story. It is not. The dot.Com bubble burst, and Danny and his associates had to fight to keep Akamai solvent while many of their customers left them. Danny, the most passionate salesman of his company’s service, flies throughout the country to keep old customers and gain new ones.

The greatest irony of Danny Lewin’s life is that what saved his business and proved the value of his “pathetic idea” is his own death.

On September 11, 2001, Danny boarded American Airlines Flight 11 to California. According to a cell phone call from a stewardess, Danny Lewin was murdered during a fight with a terrorist. At 8:46 Flight 11 flew into the World Trade Center. Phone communications failed, but Danny’s technology kept the World Wide Web up and running so that critical news and government sites could continue providing information.

Ms. Raskin’s book is both a biography of a mathematical genius and an explanation of the technology he pioneered. While a difficult read for those who have no idea how the Internet works, it is a necessary tribute to an extraordinary man to whom the world owes so much.