Russian American entrepreneur, Sergey Brin, with his partner Larry Page, changed the course of the world wide web’s development.
Brin was born in Moscow to a Jewish family, and moved to the United States at age 6 to evade the anti-sentiment that flourished in the Russian community. His father, Mikhail Brin is a mathematician that teaches at the University of Maryland. Brin’s mother, Eugenia Brin is also a mathematician- but has extended specialties in civil engineering and works at NASA. On his ninth birthday, Brin was given a Commodore64 as his father could see young Brin’s interest in computing at a young age.
It was during his studies for a Ph.D. when he and Larry Page focused their efforts on BackRub, later to be called the more familiar PageRank in a rented garage. Their efforts were costly but were given provisions to continue the project from their family, and later by Stanford. Interesting is Page and Brin were not fond of each other during their first encounter at Stanford. However, they soon found they both had interest in retrieving information from large data sets.
The pair authored a paper: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The paper is now the tenth most accessed scientific paper at Stanford.
“As we go forward, I hope we’re going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work,” Brin said.
Brin and Page took leave from Stanford University, focusing their efforts on Google, forming it as a company: Google Inc. in 1998. The popularity of the company grew rapidly and they were forced to purchase better equipment and larger facilities in Mountain View, California. Google became publicly traded in 2004, quickly rising from $85.00 a share to over $100.00 in its first trading day. It now continues to grow beyond $410.00 a share today.