Larry Page

Lawrence “Larry Page” is an American Computer Scientist and Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergey Brin. On April 4, 2011, Page succeeded Eric Schmidt as the Chief Executive Officer of Google.

As of 2013, Page’s personal wealth is estimated to be USD23 billion, ranking him number 20 on the Forbes 400 List of the 400 richest Americans.

Page is the inventor of PageRank, the foundation of Google’s search ranking algorithm, and he and Brin own approximately 16 percent of Google’s stock.

Larry Page was born on March 26, 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan, United States to Carl Page a Computer PhD holder who was considered a “Pioneer in Computer Science and artificial intelligence”. Both he and Page’s mother, Gloria were Computer science professors at the Michigan State University.

Page’s mother is Jewish, but he was raised without religion.

He attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979 and later graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991.

Page holds a bachelors of science in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, Page created “an inkjet printer made of LEGO bricks” (actually a line plotter).

He served as the president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, and was a member of the 1993 “Maize & Blue” University of Michigan Solar Car team.

His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to “play with the stuff lying around”. He became the “first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from word processor”. His older brother also taught him how to take things apart and before long he was taking “everything in his house apart to see how it worked”. He said that ‘from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company”.

After enrolling in a computer science Ph.D. program at Stanford University, Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as the best advice he ever got. Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page, with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind. In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined Sergy Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.

John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote that Page had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'. Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:

At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler. The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry.”

Brin and Page originally met in March 1995 during a spring orientation of new Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became friends.

To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. It relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.

Larry Page is married to Lucinda Southworth since 2007 and they have a son. Southworth is a research scientist and the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth.

Before he married Southworth he dated Google’s former head of location products Marissa Mayer, who became Yahoo’s CEO in July 2012.

His sibling is Carl Victor Page, jr.

Awards and Recognition

PC Magazine has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards.

In 2002, Page was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow and along with Sergey Brin, was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

In 2003, Page, along with Brin, received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses." In 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for "their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today."

In 2004, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Also that year, Page and Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In 2004 the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.

In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2009, Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan during graduation commencement ceremonies.

In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the Forbes list of billionaires and as the 11th richest person in the United States.

As of October 2012, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index lists Page as the 27th richest man in the world with an estimated net worth of 21.1 billion.

Source

Category: Important People in the World

Larry Page

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