The Google Guys Read Online Free PDF

age thirteen. “At least in the U.S., bar mitzvahs are associated with getting lots of gifts and money, and I was never comfortable with that.”

The Math Prodigy
    The family did thrive, although not nearly to the extent Sergey has. Michael Brin is now a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. His mother—over sixty when the family emigrated—taught Russian for several years at the University of Maryland. Eugenia became a scientist at NASA. Sergey was six years old when his family landed in Maryland. His brother, Sam, was born in Maryland in 1988.
    The elder Brin is still a curmudgeonly and short-tempered man, although, says Kenneth Berg, a fellow professor at the University of Maryland, “There is not a ruthless bone in his body.” But he was a tough professor, gruff enough to hand graded papers back with the comment “My sincere condolences.” He’s also a stern parent. “Michael has always been very demanding and judgmental,” says Katok. “Sergey was certainly very bright, but kind of quiet. His dad had exacting standards and I don’t think at an early age he really appreciated the brilliance of his son.”
    Michael Brin discovered his son’s promise one day when Sergey was eight or nine years old. Katok and other colleagues from the university were sitting around the Brin house listening to Michael complain about how stupid his undergrads were. He had tried giving them a graduate-level math problem, just a little above the capabilities of most undergrads, he grumbled, yet not one of the students had had the brains to solve it.
    Sergey, who had been quietly sitting in the corner, decided to speak up, and in his “squeaky little voice,” according to Katok, offered a solution to the problem. At first, his father dismissed him. Katok then interjected: “No, Michael. That’s the correct answer.” Adds Katok: “In my memory, it was the first time Michael took his son seriously.”
    Sergey was also fascinated with computers at an early age. He got his first computer, a Commodore 64, around 1982, when he was nine years old. He soon discovered the Internet. For a while, he frequented primitive chat rooms, then called IRCs, or Internet relay chats, but later recalled that he grew bored with them once they became dominated by “10-year-old boys trying to talk about sex.” 3 He, on the other hand, was a ten-year-old boy interested in computer games, and graduated to multi-user dungeons (MUDs) where computer whiz kids stayed up late to battle each other as virtual warriors. He even wrote his own MUD game.
    Like Larry, Sergey also attended a Montessori school until about age ten, and was quite happy there. But he was bored with high school and dropped out after three years. There was simply nothing left for him to learn there. His father started calling him the “high-school dropout.” Instead, however, he applied to the University of Maryland and was accepted a year earlier than the average high-school graduate. He was taking senior-level mathematics classes after about a year, and took several graduate-level courses before he graduated. He also took summer jobs at prestigious research labs at Wolfram Research, General Electric Information Services, and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.
    Around 1993, he downloaded an early version of Mosaic, the graphical interface that evolved into the Netscape browser and turned the esoteric Internet into the point-and-click World Wide Web, leading millions of people online. “I thought it was pretty cool,” he said in January 2000. “It was a fun thing to play with.” 4
    Kenneth Berg, from whom Sergey took a differential equations course at the University of Maryland, knew he was a very promising mathematician. Berg recalls writing on the board a geometrical proof of a problem when Sergey politely raised his hand and explained, from a