The Google Guys Read Online Free PDF Page B

purely conceptual level, why that proof could not possibly be true. Berg looked at the board and realized he had written down the proof incorrectly.
    â€œIt was really impressive,” Berg says. “He really understood how to think mathematically from a very young age.” Even then, adds Berg, Sergey offered his opinion without arrogance. “He simply saw something wrong” and felt the need to correct it, says Berg. Still, no one today would accuse Sergey of any lack in the ego department. He always had a tendency to correct teachers, professors, and colleagues, and retains that habit today.
    Still, Berg adds, “He’s a super nice guy. There’s a gentle spirit about him. He seems to be somebody who wants to use his intellect to do good.”
    Sergey graduated in 1993 with a dual degree in math and computer science, and entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford in 1994. He had turned out to be such a brilliant mathematician that his father expected big things from him. But business mogul was not one of them. After Google was started, Michael Brin told the University of Maryland student newspaper, “I expected him to get his Ph.D. and become somebody, maybe a professor.”
    Dr. Larry Brilliant, who is now chief philanthropy evangelist at Google.org , the company’s philanthropic arm, believes that both Larry’s and Sergey’s family backgrounds are what make them idealists with a tendency to favor small corporations and individuals over the business elite. “Inside their minds, what’s at the core of Larry and Sergey—and they’ll disagree on this, so it’s not like it’s an absolute—but they come from a very moral base,” he says. “Sergey was raised in the Soviet Union and his family went through a hell of a lot. He doesn’t ever want to see that happen again. He approaches things not necessarily looking at them from the top of the food chain. He’s much more sympathetic to regular people.”
    There’s no denying Sergey’s brilliance. In fact, when he joined the Ph.D. program at Stanford, he passed all his qualifying exams in the first couple of months after arriving. Most students don’t pass all the exams until their third year. That meant he didn’t actually have to take any classes—just write a thesis in order to get the degree (which he never did). “Sergey didn’t have to take the Ph.D. program seriously,” says Scott Hassan, a grad student at Stanford who worked with him (and later went on to cofound his own company, eGroups, now part of Yahoo).
    But Sergey Brin is not simply a pasty geek with no life outside his math and his computers. He’s an athlete with many interests: dancing, sailing, gymnastics. He trained on the trapeze as a youth and once said he seriously considered running off to join the circus. He’s physically fit and known to walk around on his hands for the fun of it (and to impress women).
    He’s a competitive swimmer, and when he first entered the graduate program at Stanford, his father groused that he “majored in swimming.” Michael Brin has claimed that the only course Sergey ever took at Stanford that required him to write a paper was one on computer cryptology. When he asked his son if he was planning on taking any advanced classes, Sergey reportedly answered he was “thinking about advanced swimming.” His father didn’t know about Sergey’s fondness for skinny-dipping with friends or picking locks to office doors in the old Economics Building at Stanford. “He’s a phenomenal lock pick,” says Brian Lent, a former Stanford colleague. But Lent insists they never did anything illegal, such as entering the dean’s office to change grades. But they thought about it.
    As smart, precocious boys with access to education and technology in the 1980s, both Sergey and Larry became very early users of the Internet, absorbing its