On 21 August 1973, Sergey Brin was born in Moscow — a programmer, researcher, and one of the two founders of Google.
When Sergey was six years old, his family emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States. He grew up in a family of mathematicians: his father, Mikhail Brin, became a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, and his mother, Evgeniya, worked as a researcher at NASA.
Brin followed a similar path. In 1993, he graduated with honors from the University of Maryland with a degree in mathematics and computer science, and then enrolled in the graduate program at Stanford. In 1995, he earned a master’s degree in computer science there, though he never completed his doctorate.
In 1993, Brin completed an internship at Wolfram Research, the company of Stephen Wolfram. However, for most of his time before Google, he worked as a researcher rather than a conventional hired programmer. He was interested in analyzing large datasets, finding patterns, and extracting information from unstructured sources.
At Stanford, Brin met another graduate student — Larry Page. Together, they began researching the structure of links on the internet. Page and Brin developed PageRank — an algorithm that evaluated the importance of a web page based in part on how many other pages linked to it. From this research project grew a search engine, and in 1998, the company Google.
In early Google, Brin did more than just manage the company. His role was primarily technical: he participated in developing search technologies, analyzing data, and scaling the search system. Later, his title was President of Technology.
As Google grew, Brin gradually stepped back from day-to-day work on search and switched to experimental projects. He led special Google projects, including self-driving cars and other developments that later became part of Google X, the company’s research division.
In 2015, Brin and Page participated in creating Alphabet — Google’s new parent company — and he became its president. In 2019, both founders stepped down from their daily management positions.
However, Brin did not disappear from engineering work. With the beginning of the modern generative AI race, he became actively involved in Google’s technical projects again, including those related to Gemini.