Sergey Brin

The Brin family left the Soviet Union in 1979 as Jewish refusniks, after Sergey's mathematician father Mikhail had been blocked from physics graduate work and from a meaningful academic career. They reached Maryland that year. Sergey took his computer-science degree at the University of Maryland and a PhD program at Stanford, where in 1996 he met fellow doctoral student Larry Page. Their joint paper on a search algorithm called PageRank — which ranked web pages by the structure of links pointing to them — became the basis of a company they incorporated in 1998 as Google, named for the misspelling of "googol." Brin served as Alphabet's president until 2019, and remains a controlling shareholder. His later work has focused on autonomous vehicles, life-extension research, and, more recently, artificial intelligence at Google.