Larry_Page

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 Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan's first computer science Ph.D. graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. 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 Lansing High 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 Stanford University. 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 Stanford University, 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.