Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Computer Science Faculty Building

Architecture and Town Planning Faculty building

The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Hebrew: הטכניון - מכון טכנולוגי לישראל; commonly abbriviated as Technion IIT) is a university in Haifa, Israel, founded 1924. While the Technion focuses on science and engineering, architecture and medicine are also taught.

The Technion offers both undergraduate and graduate studies in a wide range of fields, including:

• Electrical Engineering
• Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering
• Biomedical Engineering
• Chemical Engineering
• Food Engineering and Biotechnology
• Agricultural Engineering
• Aerospace Engineering
• Industrial Engineering and Management
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Biology
• Architecture and Town planning
• Education in Technology and Science
• Medicine
• Materials Engineering

Currently the Technion teaches around 13,000 students, about 10,000 of whom are undergraduates.

Early history

The first (historic) building of the Technion, now The National Museum of Science, Technology and Space.

The Technion was conceived in the early 1900s by the German-Jewish fund Ezrah, as a school of engineering and sciences, and the only higher learning institution, in then Ottoman Palestine. The cornerstone was laid in 1912, but studies began only 12 years later, following an intense debate over the language of instruction. Ezrah deemed the then-developing Modern Hebrew inappropriate for scientific instruction, and demanded that German be used instead. However, in the aftermath of World War I and the decline of Germany's influence as a European superpower, Hebrew was adopted.

The Technion was opened in 1924, although the official opening ceremony took place in 1925.

The first class amounted to 16 students, majoring in civil engineering and architecture.

During the 1930s, the Technion absorbed many Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany and its neighboring countries.

Until the opening of the school of engineering in the Ben Gurion University in the early 1970s, the Technion was the only institution in the country offering engineering degrees.

Distinguished faculty

• Computer Science Professor Emeritus Abraham Lempel and Electrical Engineering Professor Emeritus Yaacov Ziv, developers of the widely-used Lempel-Ziv (LZW) compression algorithm.
• Professor Avram Hershko and Professor Aaron Ciechanover, recipients of the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
• Professor Nathan Rosen (d. December 18, 1995), co-author (with Albert Einstein and Boris Podolsky) of a famous 1935 physics paper about the EPR paradox in quantum mechanics.
• Professor Dan Shechtman, first observer of quasicrystals.
• Professor Asher Peres, co-discoverer of the phenomenon of quantum teleportation and distinguished researcher in quantum information theory. He was awarded the 2004 Rothschild Prize in Physics.

Famous graduates

(in alphabetical order by last name)

• Shai Agassi - Executive Board member of SAP AG
• Itzhak Bentov - inventor and author
• Andrei Broder - captcha developer, prominent search engine Vice President at Yahoo, formerly vice president at AltaVista
• Yaron Brook - president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute
• Uzia Galil - founding father of the Israeli science-based industries
• Uzi Landau - Israeli politician
• Daniel Lewin - co-founder and CTO of Akamai, holder of two Technion degrees, speculated to have died resisting AA Flight 11 hijackers according to the 9-11 Commission Report
• Udi Manber - BS 1975, MS 1978, prominent search engine developer and vice-president at Google, formerly vice-president at Amazon.com
• Yossi Vardi, civil servant, entrepreneur
• Zohar Zisapel - BSEE 1970, founder of the RAD corporations

Miscellaneous facts

• The Technion is often compared to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has contributed to a large number of successful Israeli technical exports and businesses.

• A group of Technion graduates have created PHP (versions 3 through 5,) a web programming language that is installed on more than 80% of the web servers worldwide. This Wikipedia web site is powered by PHP.

• Beside academic studies and research, the Technion offers many after-school and summer enrichment courses for interested youth. These courses range from introductory electronics and computer programming to aerospace, architecture, biology, chemistry and physics.

See also

• List of universities in Israel

External links

• Official Technion website

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