Rajeev Motwani (

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...

: राजीव मोटवानी , March 24, 1962 – June 5, 2009) was an

Indian American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

professor of Computer Science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

whose research focused on

theoretical computer science Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumsc ...

. He was an early advisor and supporter of companies including

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

and PayPal, and a special advisor to

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.

Education

Rajeev Motwani was born in

Jammu Jammu is the winter capital of the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir (union territory), Jammu and Kashmir. It is the headquarters and the largest city in Jammu district of the union territory. Lying on the banks of the river Tawi Ri ...

Jammu and Kashmir Jammu and Kashmir may refer to: * Kashmir, the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent * Jammu and Kashmir (union territory), a region administered by India as a union territory * Jammu and Kashmir (state), a region administered ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

on March 24, 1962, into a

Sindhi Hindu Sindhi Hindus are Sindhis who follow the Hindu religion, whose origins lie in the Sindh region and spread across modern-day India and Pakistani Sindh province. After the Partition of India in 1947, many Sindhi Hindus were among those who fled f ...

family and grew up in

New Delhi New Delhi (, , ''Naī Dillī'') is the capital of India and a part of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three branches of the government of India, hosting the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Parliament House ...

. His father was in the

Indian Army The Indian Army is the land-based branch and the largest component of the Indian Armed Forces. The President of India is the Supreme Commander of the Indian Army, and its professional head is the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), who is a four- ...

. He had two brothers. As a child, inspired by luminaries like Gauss, he wanted to become a

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

. Motwani went to St Columba's School, New Delhi. He completed his B.Tech. in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in

Kanpur Kanpur or Cawnpore ( /kɑːnˈpʊər/ pronunciation (help·info)) is an industrial city in the central-western part of the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Founded in 1207, Kanpur became one of the most important commercial and military stations o ...

Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh (; , 'Northern Province') is a state in northern India. With over 200 million inhabitants, it is the most populated state in India as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world. It was established in 1950 ...

in 1983 and got his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in Computer Science from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

in 1988, under the supervision of

Richard M. Karp Richard Manning Karp (born January 3, 1935) is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing ...

Career

Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. He founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search,

robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...

, and computational drug design. He is also one of the originators of the

Locality-sensitive hashing In computer science, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is an algorithmic technique that hashes similar input items into the same "buckets" with high probability. (The number of buckets is much smaller than the universe of possible input items.) Since ...

algorithm. Motwani was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...

. He also co-authored another seminal search paper ''What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket'' with those same authors. PageRank was the basis for search techniques of Google (founded by Page and Brin), and Motwani advised or taught many of Google's developers and researchers, including the first employee,

Craig Silverstein Craig Silverstein (born 1972 or 1973) is a software engineer and was the first person employed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, having studied for a PhD alongside them (though he dropped out and never earned his degree) at Stanford Un ...

. He was an author of two widely used theoretical computer science textbooks: ''Randomized Algorithms'' with

Prabhakar Raghavan Prabhakar Raghavan is a senior vice president at Google, where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products. His research spans algorithms, web search and databases and he is the co-author of the textbo ...

and '' Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation'' with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman. He was an avid

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

and helped fund a number of startups to emerge from Stanford. He sat on boards including Google, Kaboodle, Mimosa Systems (acquired by Iron Mountain Incorporated), Adchemy, Baynote,

Vuclip Vuclip is a mobile video on demand service for emerging markets with more than 7 million subscribers per quarter in countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, with rollout plans for other Southeast ...

, NeoPath Networks (acquired by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

in 2007), Tapulous and Stanford Student Enterprises. He was active in the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES). He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to

hardness of approximation In computer science, hardness of approximation is a field that studies the algorithmic complexity of finding near-optimal solutions to optimization problems. Scope Hardness of approximation complements the study of approximation algorithms by pro ...

. He served on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

Death

Motwani was found dead in his pool in the backyard of his Atherton,

San Mateo County San Mateo County ( ), officially the County of San Mateo, is a county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 764,442. Redwood City is the county seat, and the third most populated city following Daly ...

home on June 5, 2009. The

coroner, Robert Foucrault, ruled the death an accidental drowning. Toxicology tests showed that Motwani's blood alcohol content was 0.26 percent. He could not swim, but was planning on taking lessons, according to his friends.

Personal life

Motwani, and his wife Asha Jadeja Motwani, had two daughters named Naitri and Anya.Google mentor Rajeev Motwani dies in freak accident
2009-06-07 After his death, his family donated US$1.5 million in 2011 and a building was named in his honor at IIT Kanpur.

Awards

* Gödel Prize in 2001 * Okawa Foundation Research Award *

Arthur Sloan Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

* National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation * Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2006 * Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Bi-National Science Foundation * IBM Faculty Award

References

External links

Mathematician at heart

at

The Telegraph ''The Telegraph'', ''Daily Telegraph'', ''Sunday Telegraph'' and other variant names are popular names for newspapers. Newspapers with these titles include: Australia * ''The Telegraph'' (Adelaide), a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, publ ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Motwani, Rajeev Indian emigrants to the United States Stanford University School of Engineering faculty Theoretical computer scientists American computer scientists Gödel Prize laureates IIT Kanpur alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Google people 1962 births 2009 deaths American people of Sindhi descent St. Columba's School, Delhi alumni Sindhi people Sindhi computer scientists Scientists from Jammu and Kashmir People from Jammu (city) 20th-century Indian mathematicians People from Atherton, California Indian computer scientists Accidental deaths in California Deaths by drowning in California