If Rajeev Motwani had decided to study the science of numbers, then we may never have had Google PageRank
If Rajeev Motwani had decided to study the science of numbers, then we may never have had Google PageRank
I'm reading The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean, and this book ends with a police officer asking the protagonist, Pierre Cavell, one pertinent question did he (the villain) fall or was he pushed? This question is relevant in this book because Cavell is a lone wolf who doesn't always play by nice rules.
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The man behind Google's algorithm: Rajeev Motwani was inspired by the mathematician Gauss and his contribution to the Web in the form of a mathematician is evident every time you search for anything on Google Pic/Wikipedia |
A similar question can be asked of Rajeev Motwani's death. How did he really die? Why did he get into the pool alone if he was still learning swimming? Isn't it also funny that, like Dewang Mehta, he too died a mildly suspicious death? If one were a conspiracy theorist, then one could say that the fact that both Mehta and Motwani were born in 1962 has something to do with it!
But such conspiracy theories don't do us credit. While the Artherton police are waiting for an autopsy report on Rajeev's accidental drowning, we can look at another thing the ability of some people to reach beyond the grave centuries after they have died and influence life today.
Who was Gauss?
No, I'm not discussing spirits or supernatural entities, I'm referring to the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who played a role in Motwani's life. According to Wikipedia, Motwani was inspired by luminaries like Gauss (1777 to 1855) and wanted to become a mathematician. Though he became an ace angel investor in Silicon Valley, somewhere deep in his mind, Gauss and mathematics would have been present.
In some ways, this could have been responsible for the fact that Motwani, along with Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Terry Winograd, wrote a paper on the PageRank algorithm, which forms the foundation of Google's search engine. And algorithms depend extensively on mathematics, so Motwani's initial interest in mathematics would have played a strong role here.
The two books that he has co-authored Randomised Algorithms and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation also concern mathematics to an extent. In this context, it could be said that, from the perspective of all of us who can't live without search engines, it was nice that Motwani didn't become a mathematician if he had, then we would have all missed out on his contributions to Google's PageRank.
Death can't waitWikipedia says that, according to Isaac Asimov, when Gauss was in the middle of a mathematical problem, he is claimed to have said 'Tell her to wait a moment till I'm done' when he was interrupted with news that his wife was dying.
But death waits not for prince or pauper, genius or idiot. However, had death waited a little longer in Motwani's case, then there is no doubt that he would have contributed to something even more world changing than PageRank.
Research Interests
Motwani had interests in various fields and his page on the Stanford University Website lists these, among others:
>>Databases
>>Data mining
>>Information retrieval
>>Web searching
>>Privacy and security
>>Computational and combinatorial geometry
>>Computational biology and automated drug design
QUICK TAKE
>>Motwani wanted to become a mathematician
>>He was inspired by Gauss
>>But mathematics played a different role in his life
