Rajeev Motwani

Rajeev Motwani (March 24, 1962 to June 5, 2009) was an Indian American computer scientist and a professor of theoretical computer science at Stanford University. With Prabhakar Raghavan he co-authored the widely used textbook Randomized Algorithms, and in 1998 he was one of the co-authors, alongside Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Terry Winograd, of an early paper on the PageRank algorithm that became foundational to Google's search technology; he later served as an early advisor and investor for Page and Brin's company. He founded the Mining Data at Stanford project, an umbrella for research into new data management techniques, and won the 2001 Godel Prize for contributions to complexity theory and approximation algorithms.