Haim Harari

Haim Harari was born in 1940 in Jerusalem

Haim Harari was born in Jerusalem on 18 November 1940, a fifth generation native of the land. His parents were Dina Neumann and Yizhar Harari, a Knesset member. He was named after his grandfather, a founder of the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, where Harari also studied.

He earned his master's and doctoral degrees in physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He submitted his doctoral thesis on symmetries of elementary particles in 1964. He joined the Weizmann Institute in 1966 and became a professor there in 1967.

In particle physics, he gave names to two of the quarks predicted in 1973 and stated the full model of 6 quarks and 6 leptons in 1975. In 1979 he proposed the Rishon Model, which suggests that quarks and leptons are made of smaller particles. No experiment has yet shown such a substructure.

In 1974 he co-founded Perach, a national tutoring project, and he chaired the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education from 1979 to 1985. He led the Weizmann Institute as president from 1988 to 2001 and founded the HEMDA science teaching center in Tel Aviv. He also founded the Davidson Institute of Science Education and chaired it from 1999 to 2015.

In 2005 he published a book on terror and reason in the Middle East. He is married to Elfi and has 3 children from his first marriage. He lives at the Weizmann Institute and in Vienna.