Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin is the co-founder of Google and Alphabet, a brilliant computer scientist whose work has transformed how the world accesses and uses information. Born in Moscow, Russia, Brin immigrated to the United States at age six with his family. His background in mathematics and data mining at Stanford led to his collaboration with Larry Page on the PageRank algorithm — the innovation that made Google's search engine vastly superior to everything that existed before and launched one of the most important companies of the internet age.

Brin's technical genius and curiosity have driven many of Google's most innovative projects. He was the driving force behind Google X (now simply X), the company's moonshot factory responsible for developing self-driving cars (Waymo), internet-beaming balloons (Project Loon), and Google Glass. His willingness to invest in bold, unconventional ideas has kept Google at the cutting edge of technology and inspired a culture of ambitious innovation throughout the company.

A passionate advocate for open information and scientific research, Brin has also been deeply involved in philanthropic efforts, particularly in the areas of Parkinson's disease research (inspired by his own genetic predisposition) and education. His journey from immigrant to co-creator of one of the most influential companies in history is a powerful testament to the value of intellectual curiosity, scientific rigor, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Sergey Brin's story begins in Moscow, where he was born in 1973 to a family of Jewish mathematicians living under Soviet anti-Semitic policies. His father, Michael Brin, was a mathematician who had been denied admission to Moscow State University's graduate program due to his Jewish heritage. His mother, Eugenia, was a researcher at the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute. In 1979, when Sergey was six, the family emigrated to the United States after Michael attended a mathematics conference in Warsaw and realized that life in the West offered opportunities the Soviet Union never would. They settled in Maryland, where Michael became a professor at the University of Maryland and Eugenia a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Sergey graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in mathematics and computer science, then enrolled in Stanford's Ph.D. program in computer science — where he met Larry Page and the two began the research project that would become Google.