Who was Shimon Peres? Here's a quick look.

Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister and president who served his country for more than sixty years, died Wednesday, two weeks after suffering a massive stroke.

Peres, the last of the generation that fought to carve out a homeland for Jews,  was at the forefront of every achievement the young country celebrated. While he was seen as a hawk when it came to defense of his country, his efforts to promote peace between Arabs and Jews is perhaps what he will be best remembered for.

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Peres was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for brokering the Oslo Accords, a peace plan that, for the first time, led to the official recognition of each other by the Palestine Liberation Organization and  the State of Israel.

Here are a few things to know about Shimon Peres.

• He was born in Wiśniew, Poland in 1923.

• He and his family moved to Mandatory Palestine – an area ruled by the British – when he was 9. Mandatory Palestine became Israel.

• Peres was a founder of the State of Israel. He secured arms for those who fought in the War of Independence in 1948.

• He served the government of Israel in some form for 60 years – at one time or another, serving in all of the cabinet positions.

• He was the man who headed up Israel’s nuclear weapons program in the late 1950s.

• He was the country’s ninth president. He also served as prime minister three times.

• He won the Noble Peace Prize in 1994, sharing it with Israeli President Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

• He was the world’s oldest head of state when he retired as Israeli president in 2014.

• He was the last of Israel's original founding fathers.

Here is Shimon Peres during a Ted Talk in 2015.

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