Brin, Sergey

Brin, Sergey

(1973–  ) Russian-American

Entrepreneur

Cofounder and current president of technology at Google, Sergey Brin has turned the needs of millions of Web users to find information online into a gigantic and pervasive enterprise.

Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, on August 21, 1973 to a Jewish family (his father, Michael, was a mathema-tician and economist). However, the family immigrated to the United States in 1979, settling in Maryland. Brin’s father supplemented his education, particularly in math-

ematics. Brin graduated with honors from the University of Maryland in 1993, earning a bachelor’s degree in com-puter science and mathematics. Brin then went to Stanford, receiving his master’s degree in computer science in 1995. Along the way to his Ph.D., however, Brin was “sidetracked” by his growing interest in the Internet and World Wide Web, particularly in techniques for searching for and iden-tifying data (see also data mining).

Search Engines and Google

The year 1995 was pivotal for Brin because he met fel-low graduate student Larry Page (see Page, Larry). Page shared Brin’s interests in the Web, and they collaborated on a seminal paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” This work (including the key “PageRank” algorithm) would form the basis for the world’s most widely used search engine (see Google and search engine).

In 1998 Brin took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. pro-gram. The fall of that year Brin and Page launched Google. The search engine was much more useful and accurate than existing competitors, and received a Technical Excellence Award from PC magazine in 1999. Google soon appeared near the top of many analysts’ lists of “companies to watch.” In 2004 the company went public, and Brin’s personal net worth is now estimated to be more than $16 billion. (Brin and Page remain closely involved with Google, promot-ing innovation such as the aggregation and presentation of information including images and maps.)

Besides Google, Brin’s diverse interests include movie-making (he was an executive producer of the film Broken Arrow) and innovative transportation (he is an investor in Tesla Motors, makers of long-range electric vehicles). In 2005 Brin was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. In 2007 Brin was named by PC World as number one on their list of the 50 most important people on the Web.