Larry Page

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For the British singer and manager, see Larry Page (British singer and manager).
Larry Page
Born Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page
March 26, 1973 (1973-03-26) (age 36)
Lansing, Michigan
Alma mater University of Michigan
Stanford University
Occupation Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
Net worth $12 billion (2009)
Known for Co-founder of Google, Inc.
Spouse(s) Lucinda Southworth
Larry Page in the European Parliament in 2009

Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page (born 26 March 1973) is a US computer scientist best known as co-founder of Google Inc. He is ranked 26th on the 2009 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and is the 6th richest person in America.

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[edit] Early life and education

Page was born into a non-practicing Jewish family in Lansing, Michigan. His parents were computer science professors at Michigan State University. From an early age, he had numerous computers available at home and he claims that he was fascinated with their details and that he recognized how important they would become in business.[1][2][3]

Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, 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", (actually a line plotter) served as the president of the HKN, and was a member of the solar car team.[4]

[edit] Academic research

After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered 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. Page then 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.[5]

John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? He recognized the value of a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web and then rank pages by such a parameter. Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:[6]

"At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
"The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."

Brin and Page originally met in March, 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer science Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends.

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. It relied on a new kind of technology which analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.[7][8]

[edit] Business

In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google. According to the 2007 edition of Forbes, Page had an estimated net worth of $16.6 Billion, placing him and Sergey Brin at rank 26 on Forbes's list of the richest persons in the world. They recently purchased a Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for 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 an active investor in alternative energy companies, such as Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 220-mile (350 km) range battery electric vehicle. He continues to be committed to renewable energy technology, and with the help of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars and other alternative energy investments.[9] [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

[edit] Awards and recognition

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..." And 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." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..."[17][18]

The World Economic Forum named Page as a Global Leader for Tomorrow and the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board. PC Magazine has praised Google as among 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." In 2007 Page and co-founder Sergey Brin were both ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine. Page spoke at the commencement ceremony of the University of Michigan in 2009. Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan on May 2, 2009 during the commencement ceremony exercises of the class of 2009.[19][20][21][22]

[edit] Personal life

Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Necker Island, on December 8, 2007. On November 7, 2009 their first child, a boy, was born.[23][24][25]

Brin and Page are the executive producers of the film, Broken Arrows. In 2004, he and Sergey Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Judy L. Beckham (2007-11-14). "Google founder plans secret wedding for early December". Israel Times Wednesday. 
  2. ^ "Carl V. Page". http://www.cse.msu.edu/endowment/carl_page.php. 
  3. ^ Scott, Virginia (2008-10-30). Google: Corporations That Changed the World. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0313351279. 
  4. ^ "HKN College Chapter Directory". Eta Kappa Nu. 2007-01-15. http://www.hkn.org/admin/chapters/beta_epsilon.html. 
  5. ^ "The best advice I ever got". Fortune. 2008-04-01. http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.bestadvice.fortune/2.html. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  6. ^ Battelle, John (2005-08-01). "The Birth of Google]". Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/battelle.html?tw=wn_tophead_4. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  7. ^ The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia. Moschovitis Group , ABC-CLIO. 2005-01-01. 
  8. ^ "Stanford web page". http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/. 
  9. ^ "Larry Page Profile". Google. http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#larry. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  10. ^ "The World's Billionaires 2009: #26 Larry Page". 2009-03-11. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-richest-people_Larry-Page_XFXI.html. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  11. ^ McDougal, Paul (2007-09-21). "Bill Gates Is Still America's Richest Man". Information Week. http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201808182. 
  12. ^ "The World's Billionaires". Forbes. 2007-03-08. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/10/07billionaires_The-Worlds-Billionaires_Rank_2.html. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  13. ^ Null, Christopher (2007-03-05). "The 50 Most Important People on the Web". PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129301-page,1/article.html. Retrieved 2007-10-20. 
  14. ^ "Google's Vision". Channel 4 News. 2006-05-23. http://www.channel4.com/news/special-reports/special-reports-storypage.jsp?id=2419. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  15. ^ "The Searchmeisters ( profile on Page and Brin from the B'nai B'rith Magazine)". 2006-03-01. http://bnaibrith.org/pubs/bnaibrith/spring2006bbm/searchmeisters.cfm. 
  16. ^ "SiliconBeat: Tesla Motors New Electric Sports Car". http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/06/01/tesla_motors_new_electric_sportscar_company_raises_40m_from_google_guys_others.html. 
  17. ^ "Brin and Page Receive Marconi Foundation's Highest Honor". 2004-09-23. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2004_Sept_23/ai_n6208748. Retrieved 2009-11-01.  Press Release
  18. ^ "Brin and Page Awarded MBAs". 2003-09-09. http://www.ie.edu/IE/php/en/noticia.php?id=225. Retrieved 2009-11-01.  Press Release
  19. ^ "National Science Foundation". http://www.nsfgrfp.org/why_apply/fellow_profiles/sergey_brin.  Fellow Profiles | accessdate = 2009-11-01}}
  20. ^ "Google Corporate Information: Management: Larry Page". http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#larry. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  21. ^ "Larry Page's University of Michigan 2009 Spring Commencement Address". 2009-10-6. http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20090502-page-commencement.html. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  22. ^ "Video: Larry Page's University of Michigan Commencement Address with transcript]". 2009-05-02. http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20090502-page-commencement.html. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  23. ^ "Google founder Larry Page to marry". Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUSN1360879220071114. 
  24. ^ "Another Google Heir Is Born (GOOG)". 2009-11-06. http://www.businessinsider.com/import/another-google-heir-is-born-2009-11. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 
  25. ^ "It's a baby boy for Google co-founder Larry Page". 2009-11-07. http://news.oneindia.in/2009/11/07/google-heir-born-larry-page-baby-boy.html. Retrieved 2009-11-01. 

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page"