Lawrence
Edward "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American entrepreneur
who co-founded the Google web search engine, now Google Inc., with Sergey Brin.
Biography
Early life and education
Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor
Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at MichiganStateUniversity and one of the University of Michigan's
first computer science Ph.D. graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming
teacher at MichiganStateUniversity.
Despite his mother being Jewish, Page was raised similarly to his father:
without a religion. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr., a
co-founder of eGroups, later sold to Yahoo! for approximately half a billion
dollars.
Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, Michigan, and
graduated from East LansingHigh School. Page holds a
Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan
with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from StanfordUniversity.
While at the University
of Michigan, "Page
created an inkjet printer, made of Lego bricks",
was a member of the solar car team and served as the president of the HKN.
Research
After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer
science at StanfordUniversity, Page was in
search for a dissertation theme and considered - among other things - 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 I ever got") and Page 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 and close friend, whom he had first met
in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had
volunteered to show around the campus.
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. In August 1996 the initial version of Google was
made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.
Business
In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. Page
is still "on leave" from the Ph.D. program.
Page ran Google as co-president with Brin until
2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt to become Chairman and CEO of Google.
According to the 2007 edition of Forbes, Page had
an estimated net worth of $16.6 Billion, placing him at rank 26 on Forbes's
list of the richest persons in the world, together with Brin. Page and Brin
recently purchased a pre-owned Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for their business
and personal needs.
In 2007, Page was cited by PC World as #1 on the
list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Brin and Schmidt.
Page is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which
developed the Tesla Roadster, a 220-mile (350 km) range battery electric
vehicle.
