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Sergey Brin

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Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is a famous computer scientist and businessman.

Sergey Brin (cropped)
Sergey Brin (cropped)

He is one of the richest people in the world today. He is best known for co-founding the company Google with his friend Larry Page. Brin also served as the president of Alphabet Inc., which is the parent company of Google. He stepped down from that role on December 3, 2019. Even after stepping down, he remains a controlling shareholder and a board member.

Sergey Brin, Web 2.0 Conference
Sergey Brin, Web 2.0 Conference

Brin's journey began in Moscow, Russia, where he was born on August 21, 1973. His family lived in a small three-room apartment. Because of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, his family decided to move to a new country. They applied for exit visas in September 1978. This was a hard time because his father lost his job. The family moved through Vienna and Paris before arriving in the United States on October 25, 1979.

Learning and discovery shaped his life. Brin studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland. He earned his degree there in 1993 at the age of 19. Later, he went to Stanford University to study for a PhD. While at Stanford, he met Larry Page. Although they disagreed on many things at first, they became close friends. They worked together to build a new kind of web search engine.

Sergey Brin, Web 2.0 Conference
Sergey Brin, Web 2.0 Conference

Their big idea used a special method called the PageRank algorithm. This algorithm looks at how web pages link to one another. It uses these backlinks to decide which pages are the most important.

PageRanks-Example
PageRanks-Example

In the beginning, they used Page's dormitory room as a laboratory. They even used spare parts from cheap computers to build their tools. By August 1996, the first version of Google was available on the Stanford website. By mid-1998, they were seeing 10,000 searches every single day.

Brin uses his success to support many different things. He has invested money in space tourism and airship companies. He also cares deeply about medical research. Because his mother has Parkinson's disease, he has donated over $1 billion to fund research for it. He also works on AI research, which is the study of computer intelligence. His work has changed how people around the world access information every day.

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File:Sergey_Brin_(cropped).JPG
Sergey_Brin_(cropped).JPG
File:Sergey Brin, Web 2.0 Conference.jpg
Sergey Brin, Web 2.0 Conference.jpg
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