Zvi Kohavi

Zvi Kohavi was born in Haifa on 23 December 1935. He studied electrical engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1960.

He continued in the United States at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, earning a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1962 and a PhD in 1966. His dissertation, Secondary State Assignment and Decomposition of Sequential Machines, was supervised by Edward J. Smith.

From 1966 to 1969 Kohavi was an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and in Project MAC at MIT. He also held an academic appointment at the University of Utah. In that period he completed the manuscript of Switching and Finite Automata Theory, published by McGraw-Hill in 1970 and revised in 1978; a third edition with Niraj K. Jha appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2010 and remains widely used in courses on combinational logic, finite-state machines and digital testing.

In 1969 he joined the Technion Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering and was among the first teachers of computer science at Tel Aviv University. His research focused on computational models, switching and automata theory, and fault-tolerant design, testing and diagnosis of digital systems. With Ran Ginosar he founded the Technion VLSI laboratory in 1984. He was dean of Electrical Engineering from 1980 to 1983, later dean of Computer Science, director of the Technion Research and Development Foundation, and from 2007 executive vice president and director general of the Technion. He held the Sir Michael and Lady Sobell Chair in Computer Engineering and Electronics and oversaw the construction of the Taub Building for the Faculty of Computer Science.

Kohavi spent his childhood and most of his professional life in Haifa. Public obituaries after his death concentrated on his academic and institutional work rather than on family details.

Zvi Kohavi died on 17 October 2026 in Haifa, aged 90. The cause of death was not made public in the first reports. His funeral took place on 18 October 2026 at Hof HaCarmel cemetery in Haifa. News Haifa and the Krayot and Hebrew Wikipedia recorded the death; the Technion Computer Science faculty lists him among its members in memoriam.

Kohavi's textbook introduced generations of students to switching theory and finite automata. At the Technion his VLSI laboratory, his deanships and his term as executive vice president and director general left a lasting mark on teaching, research and campus building, including the Taub Faculty of Computer Science building. Colleagues remembered a scholar whose work bridged electrical engineering and computer science in Israel and abroad.