Eran Ben-Shahar - Biography

Biography

Eran Ben-Shahar was born in 1969 at Kiryat-Bialik, near Haifa, Israel. Named "Eran" which is the biblical meaning of "An aware person". His father immigrated from Bulgaria and his mother was deported from Egypt, Eran was the second among 3 sons. His father Haim named the family "Ben-Shahar" which has the biblical meaning of "Son of Dawn". He attended Habonim Grammar School in town and then boarded the local Ort high school (1984). As was put out on 2006 by "Channel A" (the national Israeli radio broadcasts), Ben-Shahar was discovered at early childhood as a gifted child and was invited to attend university courses when he was only 10 years old. He began his own writing at the age of 11, while at the age of 13 he started to publish a series of articles in the Israeli journal of "Computer World". It was only revealed in the past few years that "Computer World" agreed to disclose his real age to the public only 2 years after he started his work with them. In 1988 he graduated high-school and had to join the Israeli Defense Forces. After 3 years of mandatory service he left the Army and in 1992 he started his B.S.c in the Physics Faculty of the Technion - Israeli Institute of Technology. He also made 2 years of lecturing in the Technion and at the end he graduated M.Sc. in theoretical physics (1999, advisor - Amos Ori) in the field of Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

In 1996 Ben-Shahar invented a multiple database search algorithm working parallel in the languages of English, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew. In 1999 this algorithm, along with some other web products, was sold to the million US$ company "Netvision," to produce the high rating portal "NANA". Later on Ben-Shahar admitted in a newspaper interview that it was a mistake, by his own words - "My contract to Netvision was my first and last mistake to sell my soul to globalization monsters". Since then he put most his works and inventions, as well as some of his literature works, as an Open Source. In 2005 Ben-Shahar published the book "Barely-Bear Makes Money" (Gala Publishing, 2005). The book was published in a limited edition but very soon became a bestseller due to a new approach on economy being described there. Several months later he published "42 – The Entrepreneurs' Pocket Guide" (Gala Publishing, 2006) but very quickly after that he broke his contract with the publisher and made the book free over the internet in a different name: "42 - Personal Empowerment Pocket Guide." In a radio interview in Channel A he claimed that "Anyway authors don't make money of their books, so better it be free for everyone", a rare approach in Israel that made several people and organizations angry. In late 2006 he published his 3rd book "Ofer the Fawn – The Water Riddle" (Gala Publishing, 2006), expanding his group of fans as he contracted the publisher to allow him to put a PDF version of the book online for everybody. The book is sold in hard copy and hard cover by the publisher yet Ben-Shahar is still allowing it to be downloaded free.