Author Talk - No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin

This event is co-sponsored by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, CSAIL, the Department of Mathematics, and the MIT $100K.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN will be speaking about her new biography of Danny Lewin, NO BETTER TIME: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius who Transformed the Internet. Following the author talk, there will be a book signing and an opportunity to purchase the book, thanks to the Harvard Book Store.

About the book:
No Better Time tells of Danny Lewin, a young, driven mathematical genius who wrote a set of algorithms that would create a faster, better Internet—ideas born at MIT in partnership with his MIT professor Tom Leighton.

In 1997, Lewin and Leighton entered the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition (now the MIT $100K) in hopes of attracting the money they needed to fund a content-delivery company they christened Akamai Technologies. Although they lost, Lewin continued to pursue their dream with a passion that caught the attention of both high-level venture capitalists and brilliant young computer scientists. By late 1999, Akamai boasted clients like Disney, Apple and Yahoo.

Danny Lewin’s brilliant but brief life is largely unknown because, until now, those closest to him have guarded their memories and quietly mourned their loss. For Lewin was almost certainly the first victim of 9/11, stabbed to death at age 31 while trying to overpower the terrorists who would eventually fly American Flight 11 into the World Trade Center. But ironically it was 9/11 that proved the ultimate test for their vision. When phone communication failed and web traffic surged as never before, the critical news and government sites that relied on Akamai—and the technology pioneered by Danny Lewin—remained up and running.

The Daily Beast:
“This is Lewin’s fascinating biography, but it is also a history of the Internet, and those who took it from clunky dial-up service to the speed-of-light marvel. It is also the story of the September 11 attacks themselves, and how they ground the exuberance of the 1990s to a halt. Raskin has meticulously reconstructed the buoyancy of the ’90s dot-com boom, and her restraint in covering the attacks lends a sober poignancy to Lewin’s story.”