Google: Larry and Sergey and the status quo - 1

"Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain" to be released Sept. 17, 2009

Larry and Sergey’s families came from just beyond the outskirts of the status quo, a land embattled by class struggles and bigotry. Larry’s family waged labor union battles against the American auto industry, while Sergey’s family suffered through government oppression and discrimination in the Soviet Union.

Larry’s grandfather was an autoworker and a politically leftist member of the Teamsters during its antagonistic confrontations with a young auto industry. The union was led by factions with communist influence. Larry’s grandfather participated in possibly the greatest labor struggle of the early twentieth century, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937, when the workers took over a major auto factory. Larry still keeps a memento from those days: a hammer that his grandfather carried with him for protection during the acrimonious strike.

But Larry’s father, Carl, broke out of that environment and became a leading computer scientist, a talent his sons inherited. He was the first person in the family to graduate from high school (in 1956). He then went on to the University of Michigan to study engineering. While still an undergraduate in 1959, Carl Page was hired to work in the university’s Logic of Computers Group, a pioneering research team headed by legendary computer scientists such as Art Burks and John Holland. He earned two bachelor of science degrees in engineering in 1960, one of them in the specialty field of computer science—the first graduate with a degree in that field at the University of Michigan. In 1965, he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same university.

Larry got his undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Michigan in 1995, winning many honors, including the university’s first Outstanding Student Award. But he’s fonder of telling people how he built a working programmable plotter and inkjet printer in a casing he made out of Lego blocks. He also started showing his entrepreneurial interest at Michigan, taking business classes and joining the LeaderShape program, which teaches its members the skills to be leaders in society.