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 became the chief executive officer of Google and Eric Schmidt is his predecessor.[ As of 2013, Page's personal wealth is estimated to be US$23 billion, ranking him #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.
Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. His father Carl Page earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965—when the field was being established—and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both he and Page's mother Gloria were computer science professors at Michigan State University.
Page holds a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a 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),[citation needed] 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.
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 by Sergey 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."
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.
(Wikipedia: Larry Page)
