30 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Sergey Brin

26 December 2018, 3:43 pm EST By Ruby Karnick

Sergey Brin, the internet entrepreneur and computer scientist, who co-founded Google with Larry Page, is currently the President of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. He believes that "knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance." Here are some interesting things to know about the 13th richest person in the world:

He is commonly referred to as the "Enlightenment Man," first named by The Economist, for his philosophy regarding knowledge, which was later summed up for Google's mission statement "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
He became the youngest member in the Forbes 400 richest people in the world list, at number 43, a position he shared with Larry Page, at the age of 31, in the year 2004.
He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, in the year 2009, specifically for his "leadership in development of rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web."
In November 2009, Brin along with Page was named by Forbes as the fifth most powerful people in the world.
Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in the Soviet Union to Mikhail Brin and Yvegenia, living in a three-room apartment in Central Moscow.
His father Mikhail Brin is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. He had initially aspired to become an astronomer.
His mother Yevgenia is a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
When he was six years old, his father decided that their family has to migrate and start a new life in the United States. It was on October 25, 1979 that the family arrived in the US.
After coming to the US, he was led along with a group of high school math students by his father on a two week exchange program to the Soviet Union, which awakened his childhood fear of authority.
It was reported that on the second day of the tour, while visiting a sanatorium near Moscow, he took his father aside and thanked him heartily looking him in the eye for taking the family out of Russia.

He graduated with honors in computer science and mathematics from the University of Maryland at the age of 19, in September 1993.
Following his graduation, he interned at Wolfram Research, a private company creating computational technology, who are the developers of Mathematica.
He met Larry Page, during a Stanford orientation for new students. Initially, they reportedly had disagreements on most subjects, but after spending quality time together, they turned into "intellectual soul-mates and close friends."
The duo authored the paper ""The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which Brin's focus was on developing date mining systems.
He along with Page, focus on the world's energy and climate problems at Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org that looks into alternative energy industry.
Brin is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which developed battery electric vehicles like Tesla Roadster and Tesla Model S.
It was reported that Brin invested a sum of $4.5 million in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company, in June 2008.
He along with Page, owns a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet, and reportedly pay around $1.3 million to Moffett Federal Airfield every year to house them as well as two Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives.
He is reportedly a Democrat, for donating money to Barack Obama's re-election campaign and to the DNC.
Brin and Page received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering", and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University in the year 2004.

The same year, the duo received the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award at a ceremony in Chicago, Illinois.
Brin married Anne Wojcicki, a biotech analyst and entrepreneur in Bahamas in May 2007. The duo have a son in 2008 and a daughter in 2011.
His mother Eugenia was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, following which he made a donation to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is receiving treatment.
His wife Anne Wojcicki along with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza, co-founded 23andMe, privately held personal genomics and biotechnology company. It was with this company's service that Brin discovered the possibility of 20% to 80% for him to develop Parkinson's in later years, like his mother, as he and his mother possess a mutation of the LRRK2 gene (G2019S).
According to an interview in The Economist, he regards his gene mutation as a bug in his personal code, very similar to bugs in computer code and that by helping himself fix it, he can also help other people.
He and his wife founded "The Brin Wojcicki Foundation," which has donated money to many different costs including Michael J. Fox Foundation, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Wikimedia Foundation.
In August 2013, Brin and Anne Wojcicki announced that they were separated and in June 2015, they finalized their divorce.
It was reported that Brin was involved in an extramarital affair with the marketing director of Google Glass project, which was the main reason for his divorce wit Anne Wojcicki.
In the year 2002, he along with Page, was named the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one among the world's top 100 innovators under the age of 35.
He has also made a foray into the film industry as an executive producer of the movie "Broken Arrows," in the year 2007. Later in 2013, he did a cameo as himself in the movie "The Internship."