Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin | |
---|---|
Sergey Brin in 2008 | |
Born | Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin Серге́й Миха́йлович Брин (1973-08-21) August 21, 1973 Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
Residence | Los Altos, California, U.S. |
Citizenship | United States (since 1979) Soviet Union (1973–1979) |
Alma mater | University of Maryland (BS) Stanford University (MS) |
Occupation |
|
Known for | Co-founding Google and X |
Salary | One-dollar salary[1] |
Net worth | US$55.6 billion (April 2019)[2] |
Title | President of Alphabet Inc. |
Spouse(s) | Anne Wojcicki (m. 2007; div. 2015) |
Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin (Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. Together with Larry Page, he co-founded Google. Brin is the president of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. As of October 2018, Brin is the 13th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$50.6 billion.[3]
Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of 6. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he enrolled in Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he built a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford, and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park.[4]
Contents
1 Early life and education
2 Search engine development
3 Other interests
4 Personal life
5 Awards and accolades
5.1 2002–2009
5.2 2009–present
6 Filmography
7 See also
8 References
9 External links
Early life and education
Brin was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union,[5] to Russian Jewish parents, Eugenia and Mikhail Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University (MSU).[6][7] His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.[5][8][9]
The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.[8] In 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Mikhail Brin announced that it was time for the family to emigrate.[8] They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father was "promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother 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. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.[8]
The Brin family lived in Vienna and Paris while Mikhail Brin secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland with help from Anatole Katok. During this time, the Brin family received support and assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They arrived in the United States on October 25, 1979.[8][10]
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, Greenbelt, Maryland. In September 1990, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, where he received his Bachelor of Science from the Department of Computer Science in 1993 with honors in computer science and mathematics at the age of 19, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.[11]
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, the developers of Mathematica.[11] As of 2008[update], he was on leave from his PhD studies at Stanford.[12]
Search engine development
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".[13] Together, the pair authored a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine".[14]
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.[15] The new algorithm relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the backlinks that connected one Web page to another, and allowed the number of links and their rank, to determine the rank of the page.[16]
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.[15]
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.[17]
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 was made available on the Stanford Web site.[15]
By early 1997, the BackRub page described the state as follows:
- Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
- Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
- Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
- ...
- BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra series II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
- - Larry Page pagecs.stanford.edu[18]
- - Larry Page pagecs.stanford.edu[18]
- BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra series II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
BackRub already exhibited the rudimentary functions and characteristics of a search engine: a query input was entered and it provided a list of backlinks ranked by importance. Page recalled: "We realized that we had a querying tool. It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages."[19] Page said that in mid-1998 they finally realized the further potential of their project: "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we figured, maybe this is really real."[17]
Some compared Page and Brin's vision to the impact of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of modern printing:
.mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}
In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg introduced Europe to the mechanical printing press, printing Bibles for mass consumption. The technology allowed for books and manuscripts—originally replicated by hand—to be printed at a much faster rate, thus spreading knowledge and helping to usher in the European Renaissance ... Google has done a similar job.[20]
The comparison was also noted by the authors of The Google Story: "Not since Gutenberg ... has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google."[21] Also, not long after the two "cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that was at the time beyond the web," such as digitizing books and expanding health information.[17]
Other interests
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".[22]
In October 2010, for example, they invested in a major offshore wind power development to assist the East coast power grid,[23] which will eventually become one of about a dozen offshore wind farms that are proposed for the region.[24] A week earlier they introduced a car that, with "artificial intelligence", can drive itself using video cameras and radar sensors.[22] 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.[25] They are trying to get companies to create innovative solutions to increasing the world's energy supply.[26] He is an investor in Tesla Motors,[27] which has developed the Tesla Roadster (2008), 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.[28]
Brin and Page jointly own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet,[29] 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.[30][31]
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).[32] The intended purpose of Project Glass products would be the hands-free displaying of information currently available to most smartphone users,[33] and allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands.[34]
Brin was also involved in the Google driverless car project. In September 2012, at the signing of the California Driverless Vehicle Bill,[35] Brin predicted that within five years, robotic cars will be available to the general public.[36]
Personal life
In May 2007, Brin married biotech analyst and entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki in the Bahamas.[37][38] They had a son in late 2008 and a daughter in late 2011.[39] In August 2013, it was announced that Brin and his wife were living separately after Brin had an extramarital affair with Google Glass's marketing director.[40][41][42] In June 2015, Brin and Wojcicki finalized their divorce.[43]
Brin's mother, Eugenia, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In 2008, he decided to make a donation to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is being treated.[44]
Brin and Wojcicki, although divorced, still jointly run The Brin Wojcicki Foundation.[45] They have donated extensively to The Michael J. Fox Foundation and in 2009 gave $1 million to support the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.[10]
Segey Brin is a donor to Democratic Party candidates and organizations, having donated $5,000 to Barack Obama's reelection campaign and $30,800 to the DNC.[46]
Awards and accolades
2002–2009
In 2002, Brin, along with Larry Page, was named the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[47] 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...".[48] 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 2003, Brin and Page were both Award Recipients and National Finalists for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award [49]
In 2004, Brin received the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award with Larry Page at a ceremony in Chicago, Illinois.[50]
2009–present
In November 2009, Forbes decided Brin and Page were the fifth most powerful people in the world.[51] 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".[52] In their "Profiles" of Fellows, the National Science Foundation included a number of earlier awards:
he 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.[53]
As of October 2018, Brin is the 13th-richest person in the world according to Forbes, with an estimated net worth of US$50.5 billion.[3]
Filmography
Year | Title | Role |
---|---|---|
2013 | The Internship | Himself (cameo) |
See also
- List of Jews born in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
References
^ "9 top executives with $1 salaries". CNN Money. August 6, 2013. Retrieved August 11, 2015..mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit}.mw-parser-output .citation q{quotes:"""""""'""'"}.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Lock-green.svg/9px-Lock-green.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-gray-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-red-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration{color:#555}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration span{border-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help}.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/12px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output code.cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:inherit;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint{display:none;color:#33aa33;margin-left:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-right{padding-right:0.2em}
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^ abcde Malseed, Mark (February 2007). "The Story of Sergey Brin". Moment Magazine. Archived from the original on January 21, 2013.
^ Smale, Will (April 30, 2004). Profile: The Google founders, BBC News; retrieved January 7, 2010.
^ ab Strom, Stephanie (October 24, 2009). "Billionaire Aids Charity That Aided Him". The New York Times.
^ ab Brin, Sergey (January 7, 1997). "Resume". Retrieved March 9, 2008.
^ "Sergey Brin: Executive Profile & Biography". Business Week. Retrieved March 9, 2008.He is currently on leave from the PhD program in computer science at Stanford university...
^ "Enlightenment Man". The Economist. December 6, 2008.
^ Brin, S.; Page, L. (1998). "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" (PDF). Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 30 (1–7): 107–17. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.115.5930. doi:10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00110-X. ISSN 0169-7552.
^ abc John Battelle (August 13, 2005). "The Birth of Google". Wired. Retrieved February 12, 2018.
^ Moschovitis Group. The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2005.
^ abc "Enlightenment man". The Economist. December 4, 2008. Retrieved February 2, 2015.
^ Downloaded 11 – February 2009. Backrub.c63.be. Retrieved on May 29, 2011 Archived June 13, 2013, at the Wayback Machine
^ "Wired 13.08: The Birth of Google". wired.com. August 2005.
^ "Google the Gutenberg". Information Technology. October 1, 2009
^ Vise, David, and Malseed, Mark. The Google Story, Delta Publ. (2006)
^ ab "Cars and Wind: What's next for Google as it pushes beyond the Web?" Washington Post, October 12, 2010
^ "The wind cries transmission" Official Google Blog, October 11, 2010
^ "Google joins $5 billion U.S. offshore wind grid project" Reuters October 12, 2010
^ Markoff, John. "Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic", New York Times, October 9, 2010
^ Guynn, Jessica (September 17, 2008). "Google's Schmidt, Page and Brin hold court at Zeitgeist". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 7, 2010.
^ "Brin & Page invest in Tesla Motors". eweek.
^ Schwartz, John (June 11, 2008). "Google Co-Founder Books a Space Flight". The New York Times. Retrieved June 11, 2008.
^ Helft, Miguel (October 23, 2008). "Dornier Alpha Jet for Google's Founders". New York Times.
^ Helft, Miguel (September 13, 2007). "Google Founders' Ultimate Perk: A NASA Runway". The New York Times. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
^ Kopytoff, Verne (September 13, 2007). "Google founders pay NASA $1.3 million to land at Moffett Airfield". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
^ Goldman, David (April 4, 2012). "Google unveils 'Project Glass' virtual-reality glasses". Money. CNN.
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^ "California Legislature Approves Driverless Vehicle Bill – Senator Padilla's Legislation Establishes Performance and Safety Standards | Senator Alex Padilla". sd20.senate.ca.gov. Archived from the original on September 29, 2012. Retrieved October 31, 2012.
^ "Google's Sergey Brin: You'll ride in robot cars within 5 years | Cutting Edge – CNET News". CNET News. San Francisco: CBS. Retrieved October 31, 2012.
^ Argetsinger, Amy; Roberts, Roxanne (May 13, 2007). "Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts – Oprah Winfrey's Degrees of Communication at Howard". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 20, 2007.
^ "Anne Wojcicki Marries the Richest Bachelor". Cosmetic Makovers. Archived from the original on October 28, 2007. Retrieved October 20, 2007.
^ "The Way I Work: Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe". Inc.com. May 29, 2012.
^ Liz Gannes, "Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe Co-Founder Anne Wojcicki Have Split", All Things Digital, August 28, 2013
^ Alan Farnham, "Google: Men Apparently Do Make Passes At Girls Who Wear Glasses", ABC News, September 3, 2013.
^ Grigoriadis, Vanessa. "Sergey Brin and Amanda Rosenberg: Inside the Google Co-Founder's Romance with the Google Glass Marketing Manager". Vanity Fair.
^ Grigoriadis, Vanessa. "Sergey Brin and Amanda Rosenberg: Inside the Google Co-Founder's Romance with the Google Glass Marketing Manager". Vanity Fair (US magazine). Retrieved August 10, 2018.
^ Helft, Miguel (September 19, 2008). "Google Co-Founder Has Genetic Code Linked to Parkinson's". The New York Times. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
^ "Dynamodata". Archived from the original on September 26, 2013.
^ Open Secrets https://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=sergey+brin&type=donors. Missing or empty|title=
(help)
^ "2002 Young Innovators Under 35: Sergey Brin, 28". Technology Review. 2002. Retrieved August 14, 2011.
^ Brin and Page Awarded MBAs, Press Release, September 9, 2003
^ "15 Local Business Leaders Receive Awards for Their Success in Business And The Community." 15 Local Business Leaders Receive Awards for Their Success in Business... PR NewsWire, 23 June 2003. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. [1]
^ "Sergey Brin Biography and Interview". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
^ "The World's Most Powerful People: #5 Sergey Brin and Larry Page" Forbes, November 11, 2009
^ National Academy of Engineering, Press Release, February 6, 2009
^ National Science Foundation Archived May 13, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Fellow Profiles
External links
Sergey Brin on Google+
Appearances on C-SPAN
Sergey Brin on Charlie Rose