Google: Larry and Sergey and the status quo - 2

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

Both Larry and Sergey are Jewish, but that ethnicity has affected Sergey’s family more than it has Larry’s. Sergey’s father, Mikhail (changed to Michael when he came to the United States) is a curmudgeonly intellectual and a gifted mathematician. At first, he wanted to study physics at Moscow State University and become an astronomer. But he was turned down because the Communist Party banned Jews from the Physics Department; the government didn’t want them to have access to Soviet nuclear secrets. So he studied mathematics instead, and took the entrance exams in rooms reserved for Jewish students, appallingly nicknamed the “gas chambers.” Mikhail graduated with distinction in 1970. Sergey was born three years later.

In 1997, Mikhail attended an international conference, where he met foreign researchers and academics. It was a life-changing event. He went home that night and told his wife that they had to get out of the country and settle in America, where real opportunities lay. In 1978, Brin’s family applied for an emigration permit. Simply applying for emigration got Mikhail fired from his job; his wife Eugenia had to quit hers, and the family had to relinquish its Soviet citizenship. Sergey was six years old when his family finally landed in Maryland the following year.

Michael Brin is now a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. Sergey's grandmother—over sixty when the family emigrated—taught Russian for several years at the university. Eugenia became a scientist at NASA.

Michael Brin discovered his son’s promise one day when Sergey was eight or nine years old. Anatoly 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 as too "stupid" for the conversation. 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 graduated from the University of Maryland 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 Sergey dropped out of Stanford to start Google, Michael Brin said, “I expected him to get his Ph.D. and become somebody, maybe a professor.”

Larry and Sergey brought their left-wing bias and their love of the Internet and open systems to Google. It reflects the world in which they were raised from childhood through college: an academic shire of open systems and free software. After all, what college student doesn’t appreciate free beer, music, games, programs, and information to get him through the next exam? The Internet provides everything but the beer.