Larry Page
Larry Page co-founded Google and turned a doctoral research project into one of the largest companies in the world. Born in 1973 in Michigan, he grew up in a house full of computers and technical journals; his father was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence and his mother taught programming. He went to Stanford for a doctorate and looked for a dissertation topic in the mathematical structure of the web. The insight was to treat links as citations. Academic papers are ranked by who cites them and by how important the citing papers are, and Page reasoned that a web page linked to by many important pages must itself be important — a recursive definition that resolves into an eigenvector problem. Sergey Brin, a fellow student, worked out the mathematics with him. The result, PageRank, ranked results by the structure of the web itself rather than by counting keywords on the page, and it was drastically better than anything then available. They incorporated in 1998 in a garage in Menlo Park and refused to put advertising on the results page for years, eventually adopting text ads sold by auction against search terms — which became one of the most profitable business models ever devised. Page was chief executive twice, from 1998 to 2001 and again from 2011 to 2015, and pushed the acquisitions of Android in 2005 and YouTube in 2006. He created Alphabet in 2015 to hold the moonshot projects, stepped back in 2019, and remains a controlling shareholder.
- Lived: 1973 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, computer scientist
