WEIZAC The WEIZAC project was initiated by Prof. Chaim L. Pekeris, who worked at the IAS at the time von Neumann's IAS machine was being designed. Chaim Weizmann, Israel's future first president, asked Pekeris to establish the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute, and Pekeris wanted to have a similar computer available there. Pekeris wanted it as means to solve Laplace’s tidal equations for the Earth's oceans, and also for the benefit of the entire scientific community of Israel, including the Defense Ministry. In July 1947, an advisory committee for the Applied Mathematics Department discussed the plan to build
Chaim Weizmann with a chemist who arranged for a quantity of poison to be procured. According to the story, Kovner did not tell Weizmann of his intention to poison millions of Germans via their water supply, but only of the backup plan to poison SS members who were in allied POW camps. The lesser plan was put into operation in April 1946 at Stalag 13. Kovner's story was repeated in 1998 by another Nakam leader Yulik Harmatz. There is no independent evidence for the meeting and some historians doubt it. Kovner's biographer Dina Porat wrote that Weizmann was not in Palestine on