Larry Page Biography

Lawrence "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergey Brin. On April 4, 2011, Page succeeded Eric Schmidt as the chief executive officer of Google. As of 2013, Page's personal wealth is estimated to be US$20.3 billion, ranking him #13 on the Forbes 400 list of the 400 richest Americans.

Page is the inventor of PageRank, the foundation of Google's search ranking algorithm, and he and Brin own approximately 16 percent of Google's stock.

Early life and education

Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan, United States (U.S.). His father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965"?when the field was being established"?and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both he and Page's mother, Gloria, were computer science professors at Michigan State University. Page's mother is Jewish, but he was raised without religion.

Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Master of Science 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 Beta Epsilon chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car team.

During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his 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." 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 that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually".

After enrolling in a computer science Ph.D. program 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, which Page later recalled as the best advice he ever got. 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.

John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote that Page 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 devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'." Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:

Brin and Page originally met in March 1995 during a spring orientation of new 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 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 that 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.

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. In January 2011 Google announced that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April the same year. Both Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar. On April 4, 2011, Page officially became the chief executive of Google, while Schmidt stepped down to become executive chairman of Google. Page also sits on the Board of Directors of Google.

Other interests

Page is an investor in Tesla Motors. He has invested in 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. At the question and answer section of the 2013 Google I/O keynote talk, Larry Page expressed an interest in Burning Man.

Awards and recognition

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 2002, Page was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow and along with Sergey Brin, was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

In 2003, Page, along with Brin, received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses." In 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize 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 2004, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Also that year, Page and Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In 2004 the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.

In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2009, Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan during graduation commencement ceremonies.

In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the Forbes list of billionaires and as the 11th richest person in the United States.

As of October 2012, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index lists Page as the 27th richest man in the world with an estimated net worth of 21.1 billion.

Personal life

Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island Necker Island in 2007. Southworth is a research scientist, and the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. As of November 2009, Page and Southworth are parents of a son. Page formerly dated Google's former head of location products Marissa Mayer, who became Yahoo!'s CEO in July 2012.

Page announced on his [[Google+]] profile in May 2013 that his right vocal cord is paralyzed from a cold that he contracted the previous summer, while his left cord was paralyzed in 1999. Page explained that he has been suffering from a vocal cord issue for fourteen years and, as of his May 2013 post, doctors were still unable to identify the exact cause of the problem. The Google+ post also revealed that Page had donated a considerable sum of money to a vocal cord nerve function research program at the Voice Health Institute in Boston, U.S"?an anonymous source has stated that the donation exceeds US$20 million.

See also