Larry Page University Commencement Address (2009 Speech to College Students)

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Lawrence "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergey Brin. On April 4, 2011, Page succeeded Eric Schmidt as the chief executive officer of Google. As of 2013, Page's personal wealth is estimated to be US$20.3 billion, ranking him #13 on the Forbes 400 list of the 400 richest Americans. Page is the inventor of PageRank, the foundation of Google's search ranking algorithm, and he and Brin own approximately 16 percent of Google's stock. Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan, United States (U.S.).[7] His father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965—when the field was being established—and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both he and Page's mother, Gloria, were computer science professors at Michigan State University.[8][9] Page's mother is Jewish, but he was raised without religion.[10] Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University.[11] While at the University of Michigan, Page created "an inkjet printer made of LEGO bricks" (actually a line plotter),[citation needed] served as the president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of Eta Kappa Nu,[12] and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car team.[13] During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house "was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place". His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around". He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor."[14] 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 really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually".[14] After enrolling in a computer science Ph.D. 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.[15][16] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as the best advice he ever got.[17] Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page, with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind.[16] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_page Image By Marcin Mycielski, European Parliament (Stansfield) (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons