Famous Israeli Scientists

A.M. Turing Award-winning Israeli-American computer scientist Judea Pearl is known for his work on artificial intelligence and for creating the Bayesian network. He has penned several books on causality, too. He is also known as the father of Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was beheaded by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan.

Turing Award-winning Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir is one of the co-inventors of RSA encryption. He also owns patents to more than a dozen more inventions. He has been associated with the University of Warwick and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has also taught at the Weizmann Institute.

Daniel M. Lewin was an American–Israeli entrepreneur and mathematician best remembered for co-founding the popular internet company Akamai Technologies. On September 11, 2001, Lewin became the first victim of the September 11 attacks when he was stabbed to death onboard American Airlines Flight 11 by one of the hijackers.

Shafi Goldwasser is a computer scientist who serves as the chief scientist of Duality Technologies which she co-founded in 2016. In 1997, she started serving as RSA Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), becoming the institute's first holder of the professorship. In 2012, she was honored with the Turing Award for her work in the field of cryptography.

A well-known human rights activist, Natan Sharansky not just campaigned for the rights of the Jews and spent 9 years in a prison in Siberia, but was also a chess prodigy, who was a champion at age 14. He has also penned books and won multiple awards.

Ada Yonath is an Israeli crystallographer. She is best known for her work on the structure of the ribosome, for which she received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz. The first Israeli woman to win the Nobel Prize, she occupies the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professorial Chair at the Weizmann Institute.  

Dan Shechtman is a scientist currently serving as the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He is best known for his work in the field of quasiperiodic crystals. He received the  Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011. He unsuccessfully ran for the post of president of Israel in 2014.

Michael O. Rabin is an Israeli computer scientist and mathematician. He is best known for creating the popular Rabin–Karp string search algorithm. In 1976, Michael O. Rabin was honored with the prestigious Turing Award for a paper written in 1959. In 2010, Rabin was presented with the Tel Aviv University Dan David Prize.

Robert Aumann is an Israeli-American mathematician. He is a professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. A founding member of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005. 

Moshé Feldenkrais was a Ukrainian-Israeli physicist and engineer. He founded the Feldenkrais Method of physical exercise that aims to improve mind-body coordination. He earned his Doctor of Science in Physics at the University of Paris, where he studied under Marie Curie. He earned a black belt in judo and became a co-founding member of the Ju-Jitsu Club de France. 

Jacob Bekenstein was born to Polish Jew immigrant parents in Mexico. The Rothschild Prize-winning physicist later also gained both American and Israeli citizenships. He is best remembered for his discovery of thermodynamic properties in black holes. The Princeton alumnus and Technion professor was also quite a religious man.

Physicist Nathan Rosen was born tom Jewish parents in New York. The MIT alumnus later gained recognition in the scientific circle for co-authoring a paper with Albert Einstein, which laid down what is now known as the wormhole, or the Einstein-Rosen bridge. He was also instrumental in establishing various institutes.

Yigael Yadin was an Israeli archeologist, soldier, and politician. From 1977 to 1981, he served as the second chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and deputy prime minister. He had an extensive career in the army, following which he joined politics. He was also a brilliant archeologist and received the Israel Prize in Jewish studies. 

Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Aaron Ciechanover is best known for his research on the mechanism that allows cells to destroy unwanted proteins. Part of the faculty at Technion, he is also part of Patient Innovation’s advisory board and has also been associated with companies such as Rosetta Genomics.

Elon Lindenstrauss is an Israeli mathematician who has been serving as a professor at Princeton University since 2004. He is best known for his research work in the area of ergodic theory. In 1988, Elon Lindenstrauss participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad where he won a bronze medal. He has also received several other awards, including the 2010 Fields Medal.

Mathilde Krim was an Israeli medical researcher best known for her association with amfAR, an international nonprofit organization that aims at supporting AIDS research; she was the founding chairman of the organization. For her immense contribution to the field of AIDS research, Mathilde Krim was honored with the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000.

Born to Jewish teacher parents in Hungary, Avram Hershko spent a few years in a concentration camp during World War II. He and his family managed to escape and settled in Israel, where he became a renowned chemist, later winning the Nobel Prize for discovering how cells remove unwanted proteins.

Born in Israel, Arieh Warshel had been part of the Israeli Army before he moved to the U.S. for his PhD at Harvard University. His research on computational enzymology helped him create computer models of chemical reactions and earned him a Nobel Prize. He later established a computational biology institute.

Swiss-born programmer Andi Gutmans holds the citizenships of 4 countries, including that of the US, Britain, Israel, and his home country, Switzerland. The Google VP is a co-creator of PHP and a co-founder of Zend Technologies. Surprisingly, he wasn’t academically brilliant and took 4.5 years to complete a 3-year Technion degree.

Israeli theoretical physicist Yuval Ne'eman grew up in Egypt and was gearing up to be an engineer and take over his family business of pumps. He also fought wars for Israel’s independence but later joined military intelligence. He is said to have inspired a character in Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File.

Turing Award-winning Israeli computer scientist Amir Pnueli established the Tel Aviv University’s computer science department and was the son of Prof. Shay Pnueli, one of the founders of the university. He is best known for his research on temporal logic in computing and also co-founded the AdCad software.

Palestinian doctor of medicine, author and academic Ghada Karmi is associated with the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter as research fellow and lecturer. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Karmi has penned several articles on Palestinian issues in Wayback Machine and in newspapers and magazines like Journal of Palestine Studies and The Guardian.

Though given a strict Jewish education, British-Israeli physicist Cyril Domb turned out to be a math prodigy. He also worked on radars during World War II and later taught at Cambridge and King’s College London. He also formed an association of Jewish scientists and penned books such as Maaser Kesafim.

Sophia Getzowa had lost her mother at 8. A prominent Zionist, she studied medicine and became known for her research on solid cell nests and for being the first woman to teach at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was also engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president.

Michal Schwartz is an Israeli neuroimmunologist who is currently a professor of neuroimmunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She also holds the Ilse Katz Professorial Chair in Neuroimmunology. Her works helped to expand the field of immunology in neuroscience, and she discovered new roles for immune cells in neurogenesis.