The largest search engine in the world…
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Larry Page, byname of Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973). American computer scientist and entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, created the online search engine Google, one of the most popular sites on the Internet.
His childhood home was full of computers and science magazines, and that increased his fascination for technology at an early age. He was also interested in business and innovation, and by the age of 12 he realized that he wanted to start a company.
He graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991 and pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan. Later, he enrolled for his Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University.
Parents also taught in the computer fields, which fuelled his passion for computers.
Page recalled his house was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place. Page was an avid reader during his youth, writing in his 2013 Google founders letter: "I remember spending a huge amount of time pouring over books and magazines”. Page also played instruments and studied music composition while growing up. His parents sent him to music summer camp — Interlochen Arts Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, and 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".
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.
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 interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually."
Page holds a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from the University of Michigan, with honours 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, after he thought it possible to print large posters cheaply with the use of inkjet cartridges—Page reverse-engineered the ink cartridge, and built the electronics and mechanics to drive it.
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.
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. Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, would soon join Page's research project, nicknamed "BackRub." 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.