Early life

Sergey was born in Moscow, Russia, the son of a Jewish mathematician and economist. In 1979, when Sergey was six, his family emigrated to the U.S. (for freedom from anti-Semitism, according to the book "The Google Story" [2]) where Sergey's father began to work as a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he continues to teach today. Sergey's mother currently works as a specialist at NASA.

Sergey attributes his success to many factors. Growing up during the microcomputer revolution, he had an interest in computers from early in his childhood. He received his first computer, a Commodore 64, as a present from his father on his ninth birthday. Sergey's talent for mathematics and computing was apparent during his first years of schooling. In the first grade, Sergey surprised a teacher by submitting a project in the form of a printout, at a time before computers were commonplace in the home.

Sergey, and Google co-founder Lawrence E. Page have both given credit for their success to having attended Montessori schools.

Education

Sergey attended grade school in the U.S. at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Sergey enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study Computer Science and Mathematics, where he received his Bachelors of Science in May 1993 with high honors. After graduating from Maryland, Sergey received a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which allowed him to study for his masters degree in Computer Science at Stanford University. Sergey received his masters degree in August 1995 ahead of schedule in the process of his Ph.D. studies. Though still enrolled in the Stanford doctoral program, Sergey has suspended his Ph.D. studies indefinitely while he is working at Google.

Interest in search engines

Sergey expressed interest in the Internet very early on in his studies at Stanford. He authored and co-authored various papers on data-mining and pattern extraction. He also wrote software to ease the process of putting scientific papers often written in TeX, a text processing language, into HTML form, as well as a website for film ratings.

The defining moment for Sergey, however, was when he met future co-president of Google, Larry Page. Sergey was assigned to show Larry around the university on a weekend tour. Reportedly, they did not get on well to begin with, arguing about every topic they discussed, and even throwing a few pies at each other. However, they soon found a common interest: retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". The paper has since gone on to become the tenth most accessed scientific paper at Stanford University