Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin

Biography

Brin was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, Yevgenia and Mikhail Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University(MSU).[10][11] His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.[1][12][13] The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.[12] Brin told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted", but Brin only picked up the details years later after they had settled in the United States. In 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Mikhail Brin announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more", he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were not 'monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave."[12] Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, "For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father was "promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, afraid their request would be denied as it was for many refuseniks. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.[12] At an interview in October 2000, Brin said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there and am very thankful that I was brought to the States."[14] In 2017, Brin later recalled: "I came here to the US at age six with my family from the Soviet Union, which was at that time the greatest enemy the US had... It was a dire period, the cold war, as some people remember it. It was under the threat of nuclear annihilation. And even then the US had the courage to take me and my family in as refugees."[15] In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. His roommate on the trip was future Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor John Stamper. As Brin recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority and he remembered that "his first impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car". Malseed adds, "On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanatorium in the countryside near Moscow, Brin took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, 'Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.'"[12] Brin attended elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, encouraged him to learn mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. He attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. In September 1990 Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, where he received his Bachelor of Science from the Department of Computer Science in 1993 with honors in computer science and mathematics, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.[16] Brin began his graduate study in computer science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1993, he interned at Wolfram Research, the developers of Mathematica.[16] As of 2008 he was on leave from his PhD studies at Stanford.[17]

Research Interest

Brin is working on other, more personal projects that reach beyond Google. For example, he and Page are trying to help solve the world's energy and climate problems at Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, which invests in the alternative energyindustry to find wider sources of renewable energy. The company acknowledges that its founders want "to solve really big problems using technology".[26] In October 2010, for example, they invested in a major offshore wind power development to assist the East coast power grid,[27] which will eventually become one of about a dozen offshore wind farms that are proposed for the region.[28] A week earlier they introduced a car that, with "artificial intelligence", can drive itself using video cameras and radar sensors.[26] In the future, drivers of cars with similar sensors would have fewer accidents. These safer vehicles could therefore be built lighter and require less fuel consumption.[29] They are trying to get companies to create innovative solutions to increasing the world's energy supply.[30] He is an investor in Tesla Motors,[31] which has developed the Tesla Roadster, a 244-mile (393 km) range battery electric vehicle as well as the Tesla Model S, a 265-mile (426 km) range battery electric vehicle. In 2004, he and Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 he was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders". In June 2008, Brin invested $4.5 million in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. Space Adventures, the only company that sends tourists to space, has sent five of them so far.[32] Brin and Page jointly own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet,[33] and pay $1.3 million a year to house them and two Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives at Moffett Federal Airfield. The aircraft have had scientific equipment installed by NASA to allow experimental data to be collected in flight.[34][35] In 2012, Brin has been involved with the Project Glass program and has demoed eyeglass prototypes. Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD).[36] The intended purpose of Project Glass products would be the hands-free displaying of information currently available to most smartphone users,[37] and allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands.[38] Brin was also involved in the Google driverless car project. In September 2012, at the signing of the California Driverless Vehicle Bill,[39] Brin predicted that within five years, robotic cars will be available to the general public.[40] Brin is a supporter of lab-grown meat and kite-energy systems.[41][42] The Economist magazine describes Brin's approach to life, like Page's, as based on a vision summed up by Google's motto, "of making all the world's information 'universally accessible and useful'".