1973: Sergey Brin is born

On 21 August 1973, Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin was born in Moscow. His family emigrated to the United States when he was six, settling in Maryland. Gifted in mathematics and computing, Brin studied at the University of Maryland and then Stanford, where he met Larry Page. Together they tackled a deceptively simple problem: how to rank the importance of web pages by analysing the graph of links between them.

Their solution, PageRank, treated the web as a vast citation network. The algorithm’s elegance lay in its recursive definition of importance and its efficient computation at internet scale. In 1998 the pair founded Google to put the idea into practice. What began as a graduate-school project quickly became the dominant gateway to the world’s information.

Google’s success rested on more than clever ranking. From the outset the company treated search, advertising and spam detection as large-scale machine-learning problems. Internal research groups explored neural networks, distributed training and massive datasets years before “deep learning” became a public buzzword. The 2010s brought open-source frameworks such as TensorFlow, the acquisition of DeepMind, and breakthroughs in computer vision, speech and game-playing AI that reshaped the entire field.

Brin’s early insistence on data-driven, statistically grounded systems helped normalise the idea that intelligence could emerge from computation over enormous corpora rather than hand-crafted rules. That cultural and technical shift still underpins today’s large language models, recommendation engines and autonomous systems. On every August 21 we can remember the birth of a thinker whose work turned the web itself into a training ground for artificial intelligence.