Sergey Brin and his fellow Stanford student Larry Page invented the Internet search engine Google. Brin's parents were Russian immigrants; he was six when the family moved to the United States. His father became a professor of math at the University of Maryland, and Sergey Brin graduated from the same university in 1993 with honors in computer science. He moved on to graduate school at Stanford University, where he studied data mining and then joined forces with Page. Together they wrote the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" and created their own search engine, at first known as BackRub and then in 1998 incorporated as Google. The company was an immediate success, growing so quickly that in a few years "Google" had become a verb for Internet search. The company's 2004 public stock offering made both men billionaires and leading high-tech figures of the new century. Brin continues to run Google along with Page and CEO Eric Schmidt; Google lists Brin's title as "Co-Founder and President, Technology."

Extra credit: Brin and Page both received master's degrees from Stanford, but never completed their doctorates; Google describes Brin as being "on leave" from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford... Brin married biochemist Anne Wojcicki in May of 2007. Anne Wojcicki is a co-founder of the genetic data service 23andMe. In 2008, Brin announced that testing done by 23andMe showed that he had a greater than average risk of contracting Parkinson's Disease later in his life... The name Google is a play on the mathematical term googol -- a one followed by 100 zeroes.