Google co-founder Sergey Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist born in 1973. Together with Larry Page, he founded Google, which has since become the backbone of parent company Alphabet Inc
Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of 6. Both his parents were mathematicians - father Mikhail Brin now a retired mathematic professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The couple was compelled to emigrate out of the Soviet Union because their status as Jews barred them from intellectual and career pursuits. It was in 1977 at a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland that Brin's father Mikhail realized there was room for more intellectual pursuit in the West after meeting comparatively more open-minded colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany.
Upon immigration, Brin attended elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Maryland, while receiving a significant amount of his education at home from his father, who encouraged him to learn mathematics and retain his Russian-language skills. In 1990, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, where he received his Bachelor of Science from the Department of Computer Science, and continued his education at a graduate program in computer science at Stanford University.
Brin met Google co-founder Larry Page at an orientation at Stanford, and soon became close friends and colleagues. At Stanford, Brin focused on developing data mining systems while Page focused on understanding the interconnections among web pages on the World Wide Web. Together they authored a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." Taking their research further, they created a web crawler to gather backlink data on existing web pages, and developed the PageRank algorithm to analyze the relevance of backlinks connecting one web page to another.
Combining their ideas, the pair developed a search engine while still at Stanford, creating a tool that gave users a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages depending on a query input. As their project grew to unexpected proportions, they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in a rented garage, eventually making it the most-used search engine on the internet.
Sergey Brin is often referred to as an "Enlightenment Man", advocating the philosophy that "knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance." Aside from initiatives carried out through Google, Brin is involved in other personal projects, notably philanthropic initiatives such as Google.org, which invests in alternative energy. He is an investor in Tesla Motors
Brin's accomplishments are well embellished - he has been inducted into numerous prestigious institutions such as the National Academy of Engineering, as has received countless mentions and awards for his efforts. Currently, he oversees X, previously Google X, a research and development facility created by Google and operated as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. With ambitious projects such as the development of a self-driving car and WiFi-providing hot air-balloons under his supervision, Brin is unmistakably a driver of technological innovation today.
