Rajeev Motwani co-founder of Google, found Dead in Palo Alto

Rajeev Motwani (Hindi: राजीव मोटवानी; March 26, 1962 – June 5, 2009) was a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He died on June 5, 2009 in a swimming pool accident that occurred at his home. He was an early advisor and supporter of companies including Google and PayPal, and a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was well known for his research in theoretical computer science and was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.

There is a bit of Motwani in every technology you use! That is how ex-colleagues recalled Google co-founder Rajeev Motwani. Motwani was found dead in a swimming pool at his Palo Alto home on Sunday. Almost instantly, Net was abuzz with tributes to Google’s mentor.
A much-loved Stanford University professor from India, Motwani wanted to be mathematician, opted for Computer Sciences out of compulsion and discovered that his love for numbers found perfect expression in machines. The success stories at Google, Paypal, Sequoia Capital are all a reflection of what the man stood for. Born in Jammu and Kashmir, Motwani’s schooled at Delhi’s St Columbus, graduated at IIT- Kanpur and acquired his doctrate from University of California, Berkeley. He won Godel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.
"Officially, Rajeev was not my advisor, and yet he played just as big a role in my research, education, and professional development," Google co-founder Sergey Brin wrote in his blog Friday hours after Motwani, 47, was declared dead. "In addition to being a brilliant computer scientist, Rajeev was a very kind and amicable person and his door was always open. No matter what was going on with my life or work, I could always stop by his office for an interesting conversation and a friendly smile," Brin wrote. Inspiration for GoogleMotwani relocated to the US in the mid-1980s, later serving as the director of graduate studies for the computer science department. It is here that he mentored many start-ups and proved to be a major catalysts in the Silicon Valley developments.Silicon Valley gurus credit Motwani with impacting products and companies significantly. Michael Arrington, a serial entrepreneur and founder of the blog TechCrunch said Brin and Page always gave Motwani significant credit for helping them create what would eventually become Google. It was a 1998 paper called ''What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket'' by Brin, Motwani, Page and Terry Winograd that became the basis for Google. In the paper, the quartet said they intended to ''take advantage of the link structure of the Web to produce a global 'importance' ranking of every web page.'' They said this ranking, called PageRank, helps search engines and users quickly make sense of the vast heterogeneity of the World Wide Web.

Mentor of Google co-foundersMotwani, who was best known for mentoring numerous Stanford graduate students, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Brin, was also a special adviser to Sequoia Capital and invested in companies including PayPal and Google. Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway said in a video tribute: "He shared my attitude that the more entrepreneurs you can help, even if you only give them five minutes, go do it. He never refused a meeting with an entrepreneur that I suggested he meet just to give them some quick advice." His success, however, "never came in the way of Rajeev's quest for knowledge and innate desire to help others," wrote his friend, blogger Om Malik. "There wasn't a start-up he didn't love." Condolences poured out over the Internet as news spread about the sudden demise of Motwani.The mood of a TechFellow event in San Francisco Saturday night turned from cheerful cocktail-sipping banter to stunned silence as the news of Motwani's death spread quickly throughout the couple of hundred attendees, wrote Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com. "Most everyone who was there is his friend. And most everyone there had a story to tell about how Motwani had helped them at one time or another, asking nothing in return. I have a couple of those stories myself," he said. Versatile tech mindMotwani's research spanned a diverse set of areas in computer science, including databases, data mining, and data privacy; Web search and information retrieval; robotics; computational drug design; and theoretical computer science. He authored two books, "Randomized Algorithms" and an undergraduate textbook published by in 2001. Among other honours, he won the prestigious 2001 Godel Prize, which is awarded for excellence in the field of theoretical computer science. Motwani sat on the boards or advisory boards of Google, Mimosa Systems, Neopath Networks, Revenue Science, Stanford Student Enterprises Ventures, and Vuclipa, among others. He was also active in the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students.

About Google Fact 17

Five Things You Did Not Know About Google – Strange facts17
1- Google spends $72 million a year on employee mealsweird facts - Seventy-two million dollars a year -- that works out to about $7,530 per Googler (a term Google uses to identify employees). While the exact details vary depending on location (the Google empire spans the globe), employees at Google's California headquarters, aptly entitled the Googleplex, are welcome to at least two free meals a day from 11 different gourmet cafeterias. As if that weren’t enough, another thing you didn’t know about Google is that in addition to the cafeterias, Google offers numerous snack bars that are chock-full of healthy morsels to munch on.And that's certainly not all. Is your car in a bit of a rut? Not to worry; Google offers on-site car washes and oil changes. The list of perks for working at Google is never-ending, making it no surprise that it's considered the No. 1 place to work, offering: on-site haircuts, full athletic facilities, massage therapists, language classes, drop-off dry cleaning, day cares, and on-site doctors, just to name a few. Oh, and if your dog is stuck at home and feeling a little lonely, just bring him to work -- Google doesn't mind.2- Google was originally called BackRubLike many other booming internet companies, Google has an interesting upbringing, one that is marked by a lowly beginning. Google began as a research project in January 1996 by cofounder Larry Page, a 24-year-old Ph.D. student at Standford University. Page was soon joined by 23-year-old Sergey Brin, another Ph.D. student, forming a duo that seemed destined for failure. According to Google's own corporate information, Brin and Page argued about every single topic they discussed. This incessant arguing, however, may have been what spurred the duo to rethink web-searching and develop a novel strategy that ranked websites according to the number of backlinks (i.e., according to the number of web pages that linked back to a web page being searched), and not based on the number of times a specific search term appeared on a given web page, as was the norm.Because of this unique strategy, another thing you didn't know about Google is that Page and Brin nicknamed the search engine BackRub. Thankfully, in 1998, Brin and Page dropped the sexually suggestive nickname, and came up with “Google,” a term originating from a common misspelling of the word "googol," which refers to 10100.The word “google” has become so common, it was entered into numerous dictionaries in 2006, referring to the act of using the Google search engine to retrieve information via the internet.3- Google loses $110 million a year through "I'm Feeling Lucky"There's not much to see on Google's main search page, and perhaps simplicity is one of the keys to Google's success. When searching Google, you are given two options: “Google Search” or “I'm Feeling Lucky.” By clicking the former, you are given that familiar list of search results; by clicking the latter, however, you are automatically redirected to the first search result, bypassing the search engine’s results page.Besides the fun factor, the idea behind the “I'm Feeling Lucky” feature is to provide the user with instant connection to the precise page they are searching for, thus saving them time that would normally be spent perusing endless search results. Sounds harmless enough, right? Not so fast. Because “I'm Feeling Lucky” bypasses all advertising, it is estimated that Google loses about $110 million per year in advertising-generated revenue. So why in the world would any Fortune 500 company not patch such a gaping leak? "It's possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what's delightful about 'I'm Feeling Lucky' is that it reminds you there are real people here," Google Executive Marissa Mayer told Valleywag, an online tech-blog.4- Google has a sense of humorGoogle also offers full language support for Pig Latin, Klingon and even Elmer Fudd. Anyone else still feeling lucky? Try typing, “French military victories” and clicking “I'm Feeling Lucky.” Behold the result.Some might remember the “miserable failure” fiasco when one typed those words and clicked “I'm Feeling Lucky,” and they were instantly connected to a biography of President George W. Bush on the White House website. Now, before you jump to conclusions, this trick -- which no longer works -- was carried out by members of the online community through the art of “Google bombing.” Google bombing works because of Google's backlink search strategy.5- Google scans your e-mailsNothing in life is perfect -- or without controversy -- and Google is no exception. Google scans your e-mails (at Gmail) through a process called “content extraction.” All incoming and outgoing e-mail is scanned for specific keywords to target advertising to the user. The process has brewed quite a storm of controversy, but Google has yet to back down on its stance.Google has remained similarly headstrong about other criticisms; in an attempt to remain partisan to local governments, Google removes or does not include information from its services in compliance with local laws. Perhaps the most striking example of this is Google's adherence to the internet censorship policies of China (at Google.cn) so as not to bring up search results supporting the independence movement of Tibet and Taiwan, or any other information perceived to be harmful to the People's Republic of China.Google Street has further been cited for breaching personal privacy. The service provides high-resolution street-view photos from around the world and has, on numerous occasions, caught people committing questionable acts. Moving from street to satellite, Google Earth has also come under fire from several Indian state governments about the security risks posed by the details from Google Earth's satellite imaging. When all is said and done, there are a lot of criticisms about Google and these few examples merely scratch the surface.SearchedUm, Google does the searching -- anytime, and every time, you search for something on the internet.InterestIt's hard to think of another search engine ever supplanting our beloved Google, but it's anyone's guess as to how the internet will work in the future. Maybe you'll just have to think of something and it will appear. Who knows? Try Googling it.