Technion

הטכניון - מכון טכנולוגי לישראל ; Technion
founding	1924
Sponsorship	state
place	Haifa , Israel
president	Peretz Lavie
Students	13703 (2014)
Networks	CESAER , IAU
Website	www.technion.ac.il

The Technion ( Hebrew הטכניון - מכון טכנולוגי לישראל, ha'technion - machon technologi le'israel; Arabic التخنيون; English Technion - Israel Institute of Technology , initially referred to as the Technikum ) is the Technical University of Israel and is based in Haifa . It was founded in 1924.

campus

The main campus is located on the north-eastern outskirts. It was selected by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and has a size of 1.325 km², of which a third (approx. 0.438 km²) is built on with 85 buildings. 4,000 students can live in the student dormitories on campus.

The medical faculty is not on campus, but in the Bat Galim district , near the Rambam hospital .

history

Albert Einstein at the Technion; circa 1925

In 1907 Paul Nathan , director of the Aid Association of German Jews , made his first trip to Palestine. One of the concerns was to find a suitable place to set up a technical university. After his return in 1908, based on his recommendations, the decision was made in favor of Haifa and against Jerusalem . In 1909, the relief organization commissioned Alex Baerwald to build a university building for the Technion. The sandstone building (today Science Museum) with the oriental-looking main facade was designed as part of an ensemble oriented towards the coast, which also includes the Hebrew Secondary School . The main building at that time was erected from 1912, remained unfinished during the First World War and then served as a military hospital.

At that time, German was still a dominant language in science and technology. Many professors at the Technion came from Germany and wanted to teach in their mother tongue. However, on February 22, 1914, German was replaced by Hebrew as the language of instruction.

In 1923, the German Committee for the Technical Institute in Haifa , i.e. today's German Technion Society , was founded as the first society to promote the scientific connections of the respective country to the Technion. After a long delay, due to the First World War, the Technion started operations in 1924. The first year consisted of 16 students (including a woman), in the subjects civil engineering and architecture, where Baerwald teaches.

In the 1930s, the Technion took in numerous Jewish students and scientists who fled the Nazis. In 1934 the Faculty of Industrial Technology was opened, which was later divided into several independent faculties. In the late 1930s there were over 400 students enrolled at the Technion.

In 1948, when the State of Israel was established, the Technion had 680 students. In 1948 and 1949 the faculties for electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering were founded. The latter was later renamed the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering .

When the original campus in central Haifa became too small, then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion selected a 1.325 square kilometer area on the outskirts of Haifa for the new campus. The Technion began moving to the new campus in 1953. In the fifties the faculties for agricultural engineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, industrial engineering and management as well as for general studies were newly established.

Another eight faculties were founded in the 1960s, including the Faculty of Computer Science and the Faculty of Medicine. In 1969 the Technion received the campus synagogue Ohel Aharon . The Faculty of Biology was founded in 1970 as the youngest faculty to date.

Faculties

medicine

Computer science

Sorted by year of foundation

Architecture and Urban Planning (1924)
Civil and environmental engineering (1924)
Electrical engineering (1948)
Mechanical engineering (1948)
Aerospace engineering (1949)
Agricultural engineering (1953)
Chemical engineering (1954)
General Studies (1958)
Chemistry (1958)
Industrial engineering and management (1958)
Mathematics (1960)
Physics (1960)
Food and Biotechnology (1962)
Science and Technology Education (1965)
Materials Science (1967)
Biomedical engineering (1969)
Computer Science (1969)
Medicine (1969)
Biology (1970)

There are also 40 research institutes.

Graduates and faculty

Shai Agassi (* 1968), IT entrepreneur, former development president of SAP
Alex Baerwald (1877–1930), architect, painter and musician; Founding member
Eli Biham (* 1960), cryptologist, co-developer of differential cryptanalysis
Aaron Ciechanover (* 1947), physician, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004
Andi Gutmans (* 19 ??), PHP developer and founder of Zend Technologies
Avram Hershko (* 1937), doctor, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004
Einat Kalisch-Rotem (* 1970), architect and politician (Mayor of Haifa )
Abraham Lempel (* 1936), (emeritus computer science professor)
Daniel M. Lewin (1970-2001), computer scientist; Akamai founder

Yuval Ne'eman (1925–2006), physicist and politician - classification of hadrons by an SU (3) symmetry

Judea Pearl (* 1936), computer scientist and Turing Prize winner

Alexander Pinthus (1893–1981), architect and town planner

Amir Pnueli (1941–2009), computer scientist and Turing Prize winner

Daniel Shechtman (* 1941), physicist, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 2011

Zeev Suraski (* 19 ??), software developer

Arieh Warshel (* 1940), Nobel laureate in chemistry in 2013

Jacob Ziv (* 1931) (emeritus professor for electrical engineering), inventor of the LZW algorithm for lossless data compression

See also: Category: University Lecturers (Technion, Haifa)

criticism

In October 2014, 343 UK university professors and lecturers (including Patrick Bateson from the University of Cambridge , Ted Honderich from University College London , TWB Kibble from Imperial College London and Richard Sennett from the London School of Economics ) signed against, along the lines of the boycott South Africa under the apartheid regime called for an academic boycott of Israeli universities, as they are involved in Israeli violations of international law . The Technion is cited as an example of this involvement, which "developed unmanned bulldozers as weapons used to destroy Palestinian homes" and which developed special techniques "to track down tunnels used by the Palestinians to illegally siege the Break through Gaza ”.

literature

Yossi Ben-Artzi: Technion. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 48–51.