Michael O. Rabin

Michael O. Rabin was born in 1931 in Wrocław

Rabin was born in 1931 in Breslau, Germany, today Wrocław in Poland. His father was a rabbi. In 1935 the family moved to Mandatory Palestine and settled in Haifa, where he studied at the Hebrew Reali School under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu.

In 1948 he was drafted and served in the War of Independence. He studied mathematics at the Hebrew University and earned a master's degree there. After a year at the University of Pennsylvania, he received a PhD from Princeton University in 1956.

While doing summer research at IBM, he and Dana Scott wrote a paper on finite automata that introduced nondeterministic machines. He joined the Hebrew University in 1958, became a full professor in 1965, and founded its computer science department with Eli Shamir in 1970. He served as rector from 1972 to 1975.

At MIT he developed the Miller-Rabin primality test. In 1978 he invented the Rabin signature algorithm, and in 1987 he created the Rabin-Karp string search algorithm with Richard Karp. From 1981 he was also a professor at Harvard University.

He was married to Ruth Rabin, who died in November 2025, and they had 2 daughters. His daughter Tal Rabin is a computer scientist. He died on April 14, 2026.