Larry Page

Lawrence Edward Page^[3] (born March 26, 1973) is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as one of the co-founders of Google along with Sergey Brin.^[1][4]
Page was the chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc. (Google's parent company) until stepping down on December 3, 2019. After stepping aside as Google CEO in August 2001 in favor of Eric Schmidt, he re-assumed the role in April 2011. He announced his intention to step aside a second time in July 2015 to become CEO of Alphabet, under which Google's assets would be reorganized. Under Page, Alphabet sought to deliver major advancements in a variety of industries.^[5] On December 4, 2019, Page stepped down from his CEO position from Alphabet. Both Page and Sergey Brin remain at Alphabet as co-founders, board members, employees, and controlling shareholders.^[6]
Forbes placed him 10th in the list "Billionaires 2019".^[7] As of March 2020, Page is the 11th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $53.6 billion, according to Forbes.^[1]
Page is the co-inventor of PageRank, a well-known search ranking algorithm for Google, which he wrote with Brin.^[15] Page received the Marconi Prize in 2004 with Brin.^[16]

Early life and education

Page was born on March 26, 1973,^[17] in Lansing, Michigan.^[18][19] His mother is Jewish;^[20] his maternal grandfather later made aliyah to Israel.^[19] However, he does not declare to follow any formal religion.^[20][21] His father, Carl Victor Page Sr., earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan, when the field was being established, and BBC reporter Will Smale has described him as a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence".^[22] He was a computer science professor at Michigan State University and Page's mother, Gloria, was an instructor in computer programming at Lyman Briggs College of Michigan State University.^[23][22][24]
During an interview, Page recalled his childhood. Noting that his house "was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place", an environment in which he immersed himself.^[25] Page was an avid reader during his youth, writing in his 2013 Google founders letter: "I remember spending a huge amount of time pouring [sic] over books and magazines" .^[26] According to writer Nicholas Carlson, the combined influence of Page's home atmosphere and his attentive parents "fostered creativity and invention". Page also played the flute and studied music composition while growing up. He attended the renowned music summer camp — Interlochen Arts Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. Page has mentioned that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. "In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me". In an interview Page said that "In music, you're very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing" and that "If you think about it from a music point of view, if you're a percussionist, you hit something, it's got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second".^[8][27]
Page was first attracted to computers when he was six years old, as he was able to "play with the stuff lying around"—first-generation personal computers—that had been left by his mother and father.^[23] He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor".^[28] 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."^[28]
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 attended Interlochen Center for the Arts as a saxophonist for two summers while in high school. Page 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.^[29] While at the University of Michigan, Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks (literally a line plotter), after he thought it possible to print large posters cheaply with the use of inkjet cartridges—Page reverse-engineered the ink cartridge, and built all of the electronics and mechanics to drive it.^[23] Page served as the president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu fraternity,^[30] and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car team.^[31] As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he proposed that the school replace its bus system with a personal rapid transit system, which is essentially a driverless monorail with separate cars for every passenger.^[8] He also developed a business plan for a company that would use software to build a music synthesizer during this time.^[27]

PhD studies and research

After enrolling in a computer science PhD 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 the idea, and Page recalled in 2008 that it was the best advice he had ever received.^[32] He also considered doing research on telepresence and self-driving cars during this time.^{[33][34][35][36]}
Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages linked to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks as valuable information for that page. The role of citations in academic publishing would also become pertinent for the research.^[36] Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, would soon join Page's research project, nicknamed "BackRub."^[36] Together, the pair authored a research paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" , which became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet at the time.^[23][34]
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."^[36]

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."^[36]

Search engine development

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.^[36] The algorithm relied on a new technology that analyzed the relevance of the backlinks that connected one web page to another.^[37]
Combining their ideas, the pair began utilizing Page's dormitory room as a machine laboratory, and extracted spare parts from inexpensive computers to create a device that they used to connect the now nascent search engine with Stanford's broadband campus network.^[36] After filling Page's room with equipment, they then converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center, where they tested their new search engine designs on the Web. The rapid growth of their project caused Stanford's computing infrastructure to experience problems.^{[38]
Page and Brin used the former's basic HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate. They also began using any computer part they could find to assemble the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it required additional servers to process the queries. In August 1996, the initial version of Google, still on the Stanford University website, was made available to Internet users.[36]}