30 Fascinating Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Larry Page

19 December 2018, 9:46 am EST By Ruby Karnick

Lawrence Edward Page, the co-founder of Google along with Sergey Brin, is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. Here are some inspiring facts about him:

Lawrence Edward Page was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. His father, Carl Victor Page, Sr., earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan, just as the field of computer science was being established.
While his father was a computer science professor at Michigan State University, his mother, Gloria Page, was also an instructor in computer programming at Lyman Briggs College and at Michigan State University.
He has an elder brother Carl Victor Page Jr., who Page often quotes in most of his interviews as an inspiration as well as a mentor.
Page is said to have helped with the set up Singularity University, a transhumanist think-tank. Google is one of the institution's corporate founders and reportedly still funds scholarships at Singularity University.
In the year 2003, both Page and Brin received a MBA from IE Business School, in an honorary capacity, "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses."
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, where, he created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks, reverse-engineered the ink cartridge, and built all of the electronics and mechanics to drive it.
Page is a saxophonist, and also played flute as he studied music composition and attended the renowned music summer camp - Interlochen Arts Camp at Interlochen, Michigan.
He claims his musical education to be the inspiration for his obsession with high-speed in computing. "In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me."
In November 2014, His Family Foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund, reportedly donated $15 million to aid the effort against the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa.
In 2002, Page was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow. The next year, he was the recipient of "EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Also in the year 2004, X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee of their board, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

In May 2012, Page ventured into hardware and Google unveiled the Chromebook, a laptop that ran on a Google operating system, Chrome OS.
He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor," being attracted to computers from the age of six years.
In August 2017, Page was awarded honorary citizenship of Agrigento, Italy.
In the year 1998, Page along with Sergey Brin incorporated Google, Inc., with the initial domain name of "Googol," which is said to be derived from a number that consists of one followed by one hundred zeros.
Page is an investor in Tesla Motors, and with the help of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars. He is also a strategic backer in the Opener startup which is developing aerial vehicles for consumer travel.
During his time at the University of Michigan, Page served as the president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu fraternity, and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" Solar Car team.
In the year 2007, he married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist, on the Necker Island, the Caribbean island owned by Richard Branson. The couple have two children born in 2009 and 2011.
In May 2013, Page on his Google+ profile, announced that his right vocal cord is paralyzed from a cold that he contracted the previous summer, while his left cord was paralyzed in 1999.
With this, Page donated a considerable sum of money to a vocal-cord nerve-function research program, led by Steven Zeitels, the Eugene B. Casey Professor of Laryngeal Surgery, at the Voice Health Institute in Boston, US and Massachusetts General Hospital.
He also revealed that he has been suffering from a vocal cord issue for 14 years, and the exact reason was not know as of that time. However, later that year it was reported that his condition of paralyzed vocal cords is caused by an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

In the year 2002, he and Sergey Brin together were named by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Technology Review publication as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
In October 2015, Page was named number one in Forbes' "America's Most Popular Chief Executives", as voted by Google's employees.
It was for his dissertation theme for the Computer Science PhD program at Stanford University, that Page considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.
Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, soon joined Page's research project, nicknamed "BackRub," who together authored a research paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", which became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet at the time.
Page is the inventor of PageRank, Google's best-known search ranking algorithm.
Page was granted the deed on a 9,000 square feet Spanish Colonial Revival architecture house in Palo Alto, California. The hacienda, which is in the National Register of Historic places, was initially designed by the American artistic polymath Pedro Joseph de Lemos.
In the year 2009, he started constructing 6,000-square-foot, near his house, by purchasing properties and tearing them down. He worked with an arborist to replace some of the old trees in poor health with other new ones that used less water to maintain.
In the year 2005, Page led the acquisition of Android for $50 million to fulfill his aim to place handheld computers in the possession of consumers so that Google could be accessed from anywhere.
In September 2008, T-Mobile launched the G1, the first phone using Android software and, by 2010, 17.2% of the handset market consisted of Android sales, overtaking Apple for the first time.
In the year 2011, Page purchased the $45-million 193-foot superyacht "Senses," built by Fr. Schweers Shipyard in Germany at their Berne shipyard, with interior design by French designer Philippe Starck. "Senses" is equipped with an ultra-modern stabilization system, a helipad, gym, multi-level sun decks, ten luxury suites, and a crew of 14.