Indian Professor, early advisor to Google, dies at the age of 47
(6 June 2009)

Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford University professor who advised Google Inc. founders (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) in their college days was found dead at his home in Palo Alto, California yesterday in what appears to be an accidental drowning in his pool. He was 47 and is left behind by his wife Asha and two daughters.

Motwani, who was born in New Delhi, India, in 1962, obtained his bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Kanpur in 1983 and got his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. He was well known for his research in Theoretical Computer Science and was a winner of the Gödel Prize as well as a co-author for the book Randomized Algorithms.

Motwani founded Mining Data at Stanford, or MIDAS, a group that helped develop data-management concepts. His research covered databases, mining and privacy, according to his homepage. Awards include the Godel Prize, the Okawa Foundation Research Award and the Arthur Sloan Fellowship.

He was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, the basis for Google's search techniques. Motwani, best known for mentoring Sergey Brin and Larry Page who later established the search engine giant Google in Mountain View, California, advised a number of companies, including PayPal Inc.

He was an avid angel investor and had funded a number of successful other startups to emerge from Stanford. He sat on the boards of Google, Kaboodle, Mimosa Systems, Adchemy, Baynote, Vuclip and Stanford Student Enterprises, among others. He was also active in the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES).

"His legacy and personality live on in the students, projects and companies he has touched," Sergey Brin wrote on his Web blog. "Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it."