Larry Page
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| Larry Page | |
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| Born | Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page March 26, 1973 Lansing, Michigan |
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| Alma mater | University of Michigan Stanford University |
| Occupation | Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur |
| Net worth | 12 billion USD (2009)[1] |
| Known for | Co-founder of Google, Inc. |
| Spouse(s) | Lucinda Southworth |
Larry Page, (born March 26, 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, USA) is an American computer scientist and co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology. He is ranked 33rd on the 2008 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and is the 6th richest person in America. [2] In 2007 he and co-founder Sergey Brin were both ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine.
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[edit] Early life and education
Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page,who used to be 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. Although his mother was Jewish, Page was raised similarly to his father, and did not practice any religion.[3][4] He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr.,[3] a co-founder of eGroups, which was later sold to Yahoo!.
During an interview, Page said that "their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor." [5] His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said,"From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business. So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually." [5]
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"[6], served as the president of the HKN, [7] and was a member of the solar car team.
[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.[8] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got."[9] 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).[8] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub," he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student. [8]
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? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'." [8] Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:
- "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." [8]
Brin and Page had 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. [10]
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.[8] It relied on a new kind of technology which analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. [10] In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.[8]
[edit] Business
In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. [11] 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.[12] 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.[13]
[edit] Personal life
Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Necker Island, on December 8, 2007.[14][15]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] Other interests
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.[16] 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.[5]
[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...". [17] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and 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..." [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.[6] 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." [19]
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-richest-people_Larry-Page_XFXI.html] Forbes: The World's Billionaires 2009]
- ^ McDougal, Paul. "Bill Gates Is Still America's Richest Man", Information Week, Sept. 21, 2007
- ^ a b The Searchmeisters>The Searchmeisters
- ^ http://www.nndb.com/people/830/000044698/
- ^ a b c Scott, Virginia. Google: Corporations That Changed the World, Greenwood Publishing Group (2008)
- ^ a b Google Corporate Information: Management: Larry Page
- ^ "HKN College Chapter Directory". Eta Kappa Nu. 2007-01-15. http://www.hkn.org/admin/chapters/beta_epsilon.html.
- ^ a b c d e f g Battelle, John. "The Birth of Google." Wired Magazine. August 2005.
- ^ The best advice I ever got (Fortune, April 2008)
- ^ a b Moschovitis Group. The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO (2005)
- ^ "Larry Page Profile". Google. http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#larry.
- ^ "The World's Billionaires". Forbes. 2007-03-08. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/10/07billionaires_The-Worlds-Billionaires_Rank_2.html.
- ^ Null, Christopher (March 5, 2007). "The 50 Most Important People on the Web". PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129301-page,1/article.html#. Retrieved on 2007-10-20.
- ^ Google founder Larry Page to marry, Reuters.
- ^ Google Co-Founder Page to Wed, The Associated Press.
- ^ SiliconBeat: Tesla Motors New Electric Sports Car
- ^ Brin and Page Awarded MBAs, Press Release, Sept. 9, 2003
- ^ Brin and Page Receive Marconi Foundation's Highest Honor, Press Release, Sept. 23, 2004
- ^ National Science Foundation, Fellow Profiles
[edit] External links
- Google Corporate Information: Management
- Larry Page's Alumni Profile Detailed
- America's Best Leaders
- Larry Page's Alumni Profile Composite
- Channel 4 News: "Google's Vision", May 23, 2006
- "The Searchmeisters" -- profile on Page and Brin from the B'nai B'rith Magazine (Spring 2006)
- Video: Google Founders - Charlie Rose interview from 2001 (14 min)
- On the Origins of Google
- Why you should ignore VCs, Larry Page speaks at Stanford
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Page, Larry |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Paga, Lawrence |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Co-Founder & President of Products of Google Inc. |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 26, 1973 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lansing, Michigan |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
