Prof. Yaakov Ben Tor was born in 1910 in Germany. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he immigrated to Palestine in 1933 and was a co-founder of the Department of Geology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, together with Prof. Leo Pickard.

In 1945 he received the first doctorate in the Department of Geology at the Hebrew University.

Prof. Ben Tor contributed greatly to the study of the geology of Israel. Among his outstanding achievements was a geological survey and mapping of the Negev which earned him, together with Akiva Fromman, the Israel Prize for Life Sciences for the year 1955.

He served as president of the Israeli Geological Society and as head of the Geology Department at the Hebrew University. In 1977 he retired from the university and worked at the Scripps Institute at the University of California in San Diego. The mineral Benthorite, discovered in 1980 by geologist Shulamit Gross, is named after him. Ben Tor died in 2002, his many studies and his influence on the field of geology are still evident today.