Jacob Bekenstein

Jacob Bekenstein was born in 1947 in Mexico City

Jacob David Bekenstein was born in Mexico City in 1947 to Joseph and Esther, Polish Jews who had moved to Mexico. As a child he moved with his family to the United States, and he became a U.S. citizen in 1968.

He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in 1969. He then completed a doctorate at Princeton University in 1972 under John Archibald Wheeler.

In 1972 he was the first to propose that a black hole has entropy, tied to the area of its event horizon. Stephen Hawking at first rejected the idea, but his 1974 discovery of Hawking radiation supported it. Bekenstein also formulated the generalized second law of thermodynamics and the Bekenstein bound, and in 2004 he developed a relativistic version of Mordehai Milgrom's MOND theory.

After a postdoctoral post at the University of Texas at Austin, he immigrated to Israel in 1974 and taught at Ben-Gurion University. He became a full professor in 1978 and moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990, where he held the Polak chair in theoretical physics.

He was a religious Jew and had three children with his wife Bilha, all of whom became scientists. He died during a visit to Helsinki, Finland, in 2015, months after receiving the Einstein Prize.