Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin, mostly known as Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973. He is a Russian American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, together with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies. According to Hurun Global Rich List 2015 he is jointly one of three people listed as 18th richest in the world (21 overall) with a net worth of US$30 billion. Brin and Page each own about 16 percent of the company.
Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of 6. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Larry Page, with whom he later became friends. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in a rented garage.
The Economist referred to Brin as an “Enlightenment Man”, and as someone who believes that “knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance”, a philosophy that is summed up by Google’s mission statement “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and unofficial motto “Don’t be evil”.
Brin was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union to Russian Jewish parents, Mikhail Brin and Yevgenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
In 1979, when Brin was six years old, his family felt compelled to migrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, co-author of The Google Story, Sergey’s father explains how he was “forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college”. Michael Brin claims Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities, and that Jews were excluded from the physics departments in particular. Michael Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A’s. He said,
Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish.
According to Brin, at Moscow State University, Jews were required to take their entrance exams in different rooms from non-Jewish applicants and they were marked on a harsher scale.
The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey’s paternal grandmother. Brin told Malseed,
I’ve known for a long time that my father wasn’t able to pursue the career he wanted
but Brin only picked up the details years later after they had settled in the United States. In 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Michael Brin announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. “We cannot stay here anymore”, he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to “mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were not ‘monsters.'” He added,
I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave.
Sergey’s mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, “For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son’s, for her, ‘it was 80/20′ about Sergey.” They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father was “promptly fired”. For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, afraid their request would be denied as it was for many refuseniks. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country. At an interview in October 2000, Brin said,
I know the hard times that my parents went through there and am very thankful that I was brought to the States.
Brin attended elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, encouraged him to learn mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. He attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. In September 1990 Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science in May 1993 with honors.
Brin began his graduate study in computer science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1993, he interned at Wolfram Research, who were the developers of Mathematica. As of 2008, he is on leave from his PhD studies at Stanford.
During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending time together, they “became intellectual soul-mates and close friends”. Brin’s focus was on developing data mining systems while Page’s was in extending “the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers”.Together, the pair authored a paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”.
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. The new algorithm relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the backlinks that connected one Web page to another.
Combining their ideas, the pair began utilizing Page’s dormitory room as a machine laboratory, and extracted spare parts from inexpensive computers to create a device that they used to connect the nascent search engine with Stanford’s broadband campus network. After filling Page’s room with equipment, they then converted Brin’s dorm room into an office and programming center, where they tested their new search engine designs on the Web. The rapid growth of their project caused Stanford’s computing infrastructure to experience problems.
Page and Brin used the former’s basic HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate. They also began using any computer part they could find to assemble the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it required additional servers to process the queries. In August 1996, the initial version of Google, still on the Stanford University website, was made available to Internet users.
Brin is working on other, more personal projects that reach beyond Google. For example, he and Page are trying to help solve the world’s energy and climate problems at Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, which invests in the alternative energy industry to find wider sources of renewable energy. The company acknowledges that its founders want “to solve really big problems using technology”.
In October 2010, for example, they invested in a major offshore wind power development to assist the East coast power grid, which will eventually become one of about a dozen offshore wind farms that are proposed for the region. A week earlier they introduced a car that, with “artificial intelligence”, can drive itself using video cameras and radar sensors. In the future, drivers of cars with similar sensors would have fewer accidents. These safer vehicles could therefore be built lighter and require less fuel consumption. They are trying to get companies to create innovative solutions to increasing the world’s energy supply. He is an investor in Tesla Motors, which has developed the Tesla Roadster, a 244-mile (393 km) range battery electric vehicle as well as the Tesla Model S, a 265-mile (426 km) range battery electric vehicle.
In 2004, he and Page were named “Persons of the Week” by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 he was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders”. In June 2008, Brin invested $4.5 million in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures’ proposed flights in 2011. Space Adventures, the only company that sends tourists to space, has sent five of them so far.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page jointly own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet, and pay $1.3 million a year to house them and two Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives at Moffett Federal Airfield. The aircraft have had scientific equipment installed by NASA to allow experimental data to be collected in flight.
In 2012, Brin has been involved with the Project Glass program and has demoed eyeglass prototypes. Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). The intended purpose of Project Glass products would be the hands-free displaying of information currently available to most smartphone users, and allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands.
Brin was also involved in the Google driverless car project. In September 2012, at the signing of the California Driverless Vehicle Bill, Brin predicted that within five years, robotic cars will be available to the general public.
Sergey Brin is a supporter of lab-grown meat and kite-energy systems.
The Economist magazine describes Brin’s approach to life, like Page’s, as based on a vision summed up by Google’s motto, “of making all the world’s information ‘universally accessible and useful'”.
In May 2007, Brin married biotech analyst and entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki in the Bahamas. They run The Brin Wojcicki Foundation.
Remembering his youth and his family’s reasons for leaving the Soviet Union, he “agonized over Google’s decision to appease the communist government of China by allowing it to censor search engine results”, but he decided that the Chinese would still be better off than without having Google available.
In 2002, Brin, along with Larry Page, 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, both Brin and Page 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, the “Highest Award in Engineering”, 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, Brin received the Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award with Larry Page at a ceremony in Chicago, Illinois.
In November 2009, Forbes decided Sergey Brin and Larry Page were the fifth most powerful people in the world. Earlier that same year, in February, Brin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is “among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer … [and] honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice…” He was selected specifically, “for leadership in development of rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web”. In their “Profiles” of Fellows, the National Science Foundation included a number of earlier awards:
Sergey Brin was a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. … PC Magazine has praised Google in 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.
Sergey Brin is also the Director of Google X and Special projects.
The post Let’s google Google’s Sergey Brin appeared first on TalksFriendite .