Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page while both were graduate students. Born in Moscow in 1973 to Jewish mathematicians, he emigrated at six after his father, denied a place in physics at Moscow State University because of quotas on Jews, obtained an exit visa; the family arrived in Maryland in 1979. He took a degree in mathematics and computer science at Maryland, where his father taught, and went to Stanford for a doctorate. He met Larry Page in 1995, showing him round the campus, and they argued about almost everything. The problem they worked on was ranking. Search engines of the period matched keywords, which meant that the page mentioning a term most often ranked highest, and the results were largely useless. Their insight, worked out in 1996 as the BackRub project, was that the web's link structure encodes human judgement: a page linked to by many pages is probably useful, and a link from a page that is itself well linked counts for more. PageRank computes that recursively. They tried to license it and found no buyers, took a hundred-thousand-dollar cheque from Andy Bechtolsheim in 1998 before the company legally existed, and worked from a garage in Menlo Park. Google became the dominant search engine within a few years, and its advertising auction produced one of the most profitable businesses ever built. He led Google X, working on self-driving cars, Glass and balloon-borne internet, and became president of Alphabet. He stepped back from executive roles in 2019 and has funded Parkinson's research after a genetic test.
- Lived: 1973 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, computer scientist
