Larry Page Biography
Posted On April 2nd, 2015 By Celebrity Biographies
Larry Page
Larry Page, born as Lawrence Page is an American entrepreneur and a computer scientist. He along with his grad school friend, Sergey Brin, co-founded the Google Inc. in the year 1998. Google of course is the giant search engine which every internet user has heard of. Larry developed a ranking algorithm called PageRank which was used in the Google search results and consider to be one of the major ranking algorithm. Larry is currently the Chief Executive Office (CEO) of Google Inc. and also is the president of Google products and is responsible for Google day to day development and formulating product and services strategies. In a July 2014 issue of Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Larry Page was listed as the 17th richest man in the world with a net worth of $32.7 billion. He was also declared as the “Businessman of the year” in 2014 by Fortune Magazine. Larry Page is also a member of Board of Directors of the company, and has a keen interest in renewable energy and philanthropy. All his efforts has made Google as the most influential company of the digital era.
Early Life & Career
Lawrence Page was born to father Carl Vincent Page Sr. and mother Gloria. He was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michingan, Unites States. Carl Page earned a Ph D. in computer science in the year 1965 and is considered as “pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence”. He was a professor in Michigan State University while mother Gloria was an instructor in computer programming in the Lyman Briggs College in the same university.
With both parents as computer professionals, Larry Page had a keen interest in computers from the age of six. He used to play with the first generation personal computers, lying around in the home, left by his parents. With his elder brother’s help, Larry used to take apart the PC and other things in the home, just to see how it worked. His home was full of computer and science magazines, which increased his fascination for technology, even further. From the very early age, he knew, he wanted to invent things, making him very interested in business and technology. By the age of 12, he was sure of starting a company eventually, in the same field.
Larry studied in Okesmos Montessori School, Michigan from year 1975 and graduated in 1991 from East Lansing High School in Michigan. He pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering, with honors, from University of Michigan. He later then enrolled for Master of Science in computer engineering from the Stanford University.
It was during his PhD. in Stanford University that 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. He completely focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks as valuable information for that page. It was then when he met Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford University student, who joined Page’s research in 1995 and initially nicknamed this research and search engine as “BackRub”. The search engine was operated on Stanford servers for many many months. The duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin also published a research paper back then, called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which till date, is the most downloaded scientific paper of all time. 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 ranking algorithm called the PageRank algorithm. They realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior and advanced than those that existed back then. This new algorithm idea they had, relied on a new kind of parameters that analyzed the relevance of the backlinks that connected one Web page to another. Using their basic HTML programming skills, the duo Brin and Page, created a simple search page for it’s users. As their search engine grew popularity among Stanford users, they needed extra computer parts and servers to handle the necessary computing power to process the multiple queries. It was in 1996 that the initial version of Google (running still on Stanford servers) was made available to internet users.
The duo, called the search engine as “Google” which was derived from the mathematical term “Googol”, a term used for number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It was to reflect their mission to organize the vast amount of data, their search engine was meant to explore on the web.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, now saw the prospect in this project and decided to incorporate a company. Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote them a check of $100,00 to Google Inc., a company which was yet to come into existence. Raising a million dollar from family, friends and investors, Google Inc. was launched in September 1998. By the start of 2000, Google inc. office moved to the famous Mountain view office in heart of California’s silicon valley. Within months, Google had indexed more than one billion web pages on the web, making it the most comprehensive search engines of that time.
In 2001, Google Inc. hired Eric Schmidt as the CEO of the company while Larry page became the president of Google products and Sergey Brin became president of Google technology. Later in August 2004, Google Inc. held it’s first Intital Public Offering (IPO) which made both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, billionaires at the age of 30. In the same year, Google.org was found, which is the philanthropic wing of Google. They donate $100,000,000 each year, as on now, contributing towards challenging social issues and causes like global hunger and poverty.
In the year 2005, Larry Page led the acquisition of Android operating system for $50 million as his dreams was to enable every handheld computer users, so that they can access to Google search engine from anywhere. Larry page became passionate about the Android system and started to spend lot of time and effort into it. By 2010, Android became a market leader and one of the most popular operating system used on cell phones.
In April 2011, Larry Page officially became CEO of Google Inc. while Eric Schmidt stepped down to serve as the executive chairman of the company. As the new CEO of the company, his new goals were plain and simple. They were the development of greater autonomy for the executives overseeing the most important divisions, and higher levels of collaboration, communication and unity among the teams. He also declared a “zero tolerance for fighting” policy. By March 2013, at least 70 Google products and services were completely shutdown, while the remaining ones were unified on basis of appearance and nature. Larry started a project code-named “Kennedy” which was a project of “designing and developing a true UI framework that transforms Google’s application software into a beautiful, mature, accessible and consistent platform for its users.” All the remaining products were thus aligned with Larry Page’s aim of suite of products that can move fast. “Kennedy” project was a design revolution.
Larry Page has also ventured into computer hardware, with Google unveiling Chromebook laptop in May 2012. This laptop ran on Google’s own operating system called Chrome OS. He also is an investor with Tesla Motors. With a keen interest in renewable energy technology, Page promotes adoption of hybrid electric cars and other source of energy investments.
Awards and Achievements
in 1999, PC Magazine awarded Google, the Technical Excellence Award for innovation in web application development.
In the year 2002, Larry Page was named a “World Economic Forum Leader For Tomorrow” and jointly with Sergey Brin, was named by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Technological Review Publication as one of the top 100 innovators of the world, under the age of 35. The list then was called TR100 but the name has now been changed to TR35.
In 2003, Larry Page received a MBA from IE Business School, in an honorary capacity, “for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses.”
In the year 2004, Larry Page and Sergey Brin received the prestigious Marconi’s Foundation Prize, which is given to honour significant contributions in science and technology. They were also elected Fellow of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University.
Again in 2004, Larry Page was chosen as a trustee of X PRIZE board and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
In 2005, Both. Brin and Page were elected as Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In the year 2009, Larry Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan, during a graduation commencement ceremony.
Personal Life
Larry Page married Lucinda Southworth on Necker Island in the year 2007. Southworth is a research scientist by profession. She is the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. Larry Page and Southworth have two children, born in the year 2009 and 2011. Larry’s brother Carl Page Jr. is also an internet entrepreneur.
ALTHOUGH larry Page applied for the PhD in Stanford University, but he never got to complete it because of his business ventures, followed by Google’s responsibilities.
In 2014, Page was declared as the most daring CEO and the Businessman of the year by the Fortune magazine.
As Google’s Chief Executive Officer, Larry Page plans to make Google “a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion of a start-up.”
