Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the Google internet search engine, now Google Inc., with Sergey Brin.
After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Page was in search for a dissertation theme and decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub," he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. In August 1996 the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford Web site.
In 2007, Page was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Brin and Schmidt.
Page is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 250 mile range battery electric vehicle.