Larry Page 119
Early life and education
Larry Page was born in Lansing, Michigan.[6][7] His father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965
when the field was in its infancy, and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both
he and Page's mother were computer science professors at Michigan State University.[8][9] Gloria Page, his mother,
is Jewish but he was raised without religion.[10]
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.[11] 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),[12] served as the president of the Eta Kappa Nu in Fall 1994,[13] 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."[14] 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".[14]
After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry 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.[15][16] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page
later recalled as "the best advice I ever got".[17] 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).[16] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was
soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.[16]
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 devise a method to count and
qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'."[16] 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".[16]
Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer 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.[18]
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.[16] It relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the back links that
connected one Web page to another.[18] In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the
Stanford University Web site.[16]