Video Guru
Uri discovered his knack for problem solving as a young child in his parents' kitchen, where he overcame a nagging problem of opening, closing and keeping in place the lid of the garbage can. Ever since then he has been busy seeing how to do things differently and, at times, successfully achieving improvements or creating something new. At an early age he also fell head over heels for photography and math.
Uri grew up in Israel and came to the United States to study mathematics and photography, at the New York Institute of Photography. Later he graduated from UCLA where he studied math, logic and computer science Uri completed his masters in film production at Stanford.
Except for a short, few-year stint as a software engineer at a startup and then at Borland, Uri spent all of his professional life creating new things as an independent consultant first at Suri and Co., which he co-owned with his wife (she comes first in the company's name) and later at Ten Ninety. All in all, his range of products is wide, from business software applications to user interfaces, from games and toys to designing a line of blown-glass pendants and inventing a novel imaging construction art form.
Since he grew bored with software engineering, Uri found a new passion: applying his design thinking to improve math learning in K–12 education. Soon after Uri started to volunteer teaching math in his son's third-grade class, he realized the teachers desperately need lots of help. He has been developing new teaching aids, materials and lesson plans to augment whichever curriculum and textbooks teachers use. In addition to giving workshops and seminars to teachers and teaching math as a classroom volunteer, Uri launched MathVentures, a forum to bring his mathematical innovations to teachers, students and their parents.
If nothing else, growing up in Israel left Uri with one vice he can't shake (not that he wants to): taking afternoon naps. Perhaps this is why he is most productive at night to the small hours, reading (did we say he's an information junky?), writing and inventing.
