Sergey Brin has no documented IQ score. The “152” seen on billionaire lists has no test, date or source behind it, his record is in papers and patents, not psychometrics.
Two cities, one family of mathematicians
Born 21 August 1973 to Jewish parents, both Moscow State graduates. His father, Michael, wanted to be an astronomer but was steered away from physics by the antisemitism of Soviet academia, and worked as an economist at the state planning agency.
When the family applied to emigrate in 1978, both parents lost their jobs. They left in May 1979, helped by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Michael became a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland; his mother, Eugenia, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Sergey started school with little English and was teased for his accent.
A Commodore 64 for his ninth birthday made computers the obvious outlet; at home his father pushed him through advanced maths, and the family kept speaking Russian.
Education, written as a proof
Each step follows from the last. The conclusion is left open.
A public magnet school in Greenbelt, Maryland, after Paint Branch Montessori in Adelphi.
BS in computer science and mathematics with honours, finished in three years at age 19, at the university where his father taught.
A National Science Foundation fellowship funded his move to graduate school at Stanford.
Master's in computer science. Research on data mining and extracting patterns from large data sets.
Met Larry Page at a campus tour in 1995. Took leave from the doctorate to build Google and never returned to finish it. Q.E.D. unproven.
The moonshot board
From 2010 Brin ran Google X, the lab for long-shot projects. Filter by how they ended.
Started inside Google before X had a name; spun out in 2016 as Waymo, which now runs driverless ride-hailing in several US cities.
Brin unveiled the head-mounted display with a live skydiving demo. The consumer version was pulled in 2015; the enterprise edition ended in 2023.
Stratospheric balloons carrying cell service to remote areas. Graduated from X in 2018, closed in 2021 when costs outran the market.
Drone delivery, graduated from X in 2018; now delivers small parcels in the US, Australia and elsewhere.
Energy-generating kites tethered to the ground. Acquired by X in 2013 and shut down in 2020.
Collected works
With Motwani, Ullman and Tsur, SIGMOD 1997. Faster ways to find items that appear together in large transaction sets.
Introduced DIPRE, which bootstrapped from a few examples (like book–author pairs) to harvest many more from the web.
With Larry Page, WWW7 in Brisbane. The design of Google's prototype, including PageRank; among the most-cited computer-science papers.
Co-founded with Page. Served as president of technology, then president of Alphabet from 2015 until stepping down in 2019.
After genetic testing showed he carries a LRRK2 mutation linked to Parkinson's, he became one of the largest private funders of research into the disease.
His airship company flew the Pathfinder 1, a large rigid electric airship, after receiving an FAA certificate in 2023.
Came back to work day-to-day with the teams building Google's Gemini models.
Sources
- Brin, S. & Page, L. (1998). The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. WWW7
- Brin, S. (1998). Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web. WebDB
- Vise, D. & Malseed, M. (2005). The Google Story. Delacorte
- Alphabet Inc. founders' letter (December 2019)
- What's Your IQ editorial review of circulated figures