Larry Page

Lawrence Edward Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1973, the son of Carl Victor Page, a pioneering computer-science professor at Michigan State University, and Gloria Page, a programming instructor. Raised among computers and technical journals, he studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan and in 1995 began a doctorate at Stanford, where he met Sergey Brin. Their thesis project, named BackRub, sought to evaluate the importance of web pages from the structure of hyperlinks, by analogy with academic citation. The PageRank algorithm, filed as a patent in 1998 under Stanford's name, assigns each page a score that depends on the number and quality of the pages linking to it. Page and Brin founded Google Inc. in September 1998 in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, with initial funding from Andy Bechtolsheim. The search engine, deliberately austere, quickly eclipsed AltaVista and Yahoo! Search. In 2000 the company launched AdWords, a pay-per-click advertising auction that would fund its entire ecosystem. Google went public in August 2004 and acquired YouTube in 2006, Android in 2005 — laying the foundations of the non-Apple smartphone — and DoubleClick in 2007. Page succeeded Eric Schmidt as chief executive in 2011 and carried out the major restructuring of the group in 2015 by creating the Alphabet holding company, which he led until December 2019 before handing day-to-day management to Sundar Pichai. Reserved in public life, he invests in health research through Calico, self-driving cars through Waymo, and electric aircraft through Kitty Hawk and Opener. A holder of the Marconi Prize since 2014, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. On this site Page opens the Web era and prepares the Web 2.0 period : his search engine makes Tim Berners-Lee's invention navigable, while Android and then Chrome place Google at the heart of the mobile-cloud period, alongside Steve Jobs's iPhone and the social platforms embodied by Mark Zuckerberg.