Daniel Amit

Daniel Amit was born in 1938 in Łódź

Amit was born in Łódź, Poland, in 1938 to a wealthy Jewish family that owned a textile factory. His family fled Poland in 1940 through Italy and Turkey and reached Palestine that year. He grew up in Tel Aviv, attended Geula Gymnasium, and met his wife Dahlia in high school.

He studied physics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a master's degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He served in the army's computer unit, then completed a PhD at Brandeis University under Eugene Gross in 1966.

Amit began in particle physics, moved to statistical mechanics in the 1970s, and turned to neuroscience in the 1980s. With Hanoch Gutfreund and Haim Sompolinsky, he showed how statistical mechanics could serve neural network research. He taught at the Hebrew University, headed its Racah Institute of Physics, and from 1991 was a professor at Sapienza University of Rome.

His political activity began in the protests against the Vietnam War in the United States. He was active on the Israeli left, worked for dialogue between Jews and Arabs, and in 1972 helped found the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

He became an Italian citizen in 1999 and received the Rammal Award from Euroscience in 2007. He took his own life at his Jerusalem home on November 4, 2007.