Elisha Netanyahu was born in Warsaw, Poland, to Sarah (Lurie) and the Russian Jewish writer and Zionist activist Nathan Mileikowsky.
After the graduation he joined the British Army as a volunteer, serving in Egypt and then in Italy as an officer in a unit of the Royal Engineering Corps.
Throughout his long career, Netanyahu collaborated with Paul Erdős, Charles Loewner and other leading mathematicians, continuing and expanding the analytical traditions at the Technion.
In 1949 Netanyahu married Shoshana Shenburg, his former student at the Reali, who later became the second female justice at the Israel Supreme Court.
In other years, the speakers included Lars Ahlfors, Robert Aumann, Lipman Bers, Enrico Bombieri, Charles Fefferman, Samuel Karlin, David Kazhdan, Louis Nirenberg, Terence Tao, Wendelin Werner, and Don Zagier.