Sergey Brin co-created Google's PageRank search

Person: Sergey Brin
Lived: b. 1973
Field: Technology
From: Russian-American

The story

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow in 1973 to a Russian-Jewish family. In 1979, after months of uncertainty as would-be emigrants, his parents received exit visas, and with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society the family reached the United States in October 1979. His father became a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, where Sergey later studied mathematics and computer science, graduating at 19.

In 1993 he began graduate work at Stanford, where he met Larry Page. Brin had the idea that the web could be ordered by link popularity, so that a page ranked higher when more pages linked to it. With Page he developed PageRank in 1996, which judged a page's importance by counting both the number and the quality of the links pointing to it, much as a scholarly paper gains standing from its citations. They built the system from spare parts in their dormitory rooms, released an early version on the Stanford website in August 1996, and described the prototype in a 1998 paper. The program became so popular that Brin put his doctoral studies on hold to start Google with Page in a garage in Menlo Park, California.

PageRank was the first algorithm Google used to order its results and remains its best known. Stanford, which held the patent, licensed it exclusively to Google. Google grew into the world's most widely used search engine and made the vast, chaotic web usable for ordinary people.

Brin has turned much of his wealth toward medical research. His mother, Eugenia, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1999, and Brin learned that he carries the LRRK2 G2019S mutation, which significantly raises the risk of the disease. With Anne Wojcicki he became a leading supporter of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and in 2011 their foundation announced a $50 million challenge grant to it, including funding for research on LRRK2. In 2008 he also gave to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother had been treated. According to Forbes, he has donated more than $1 billion to Parkinson's research.

In 2019 Brin established Aligning Science Across Parkinson's, an initiative to coordinate and expand basic research into the disease worldwide. His giving is helping scientists pursue the genetic and biological causes of Parkinson's in the hope of slowing or stopping it.