Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page, (born 26 March 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, US) is an US computer scientist best known as cofounder of Google Inc. He is ranked 26th on the 2009 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and is the 6th richest person in America. In 2007 he and co-founder Sergey Brin were both ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine.

Page was born into a non-practicing Jewish family in Lansing, Michigan. During an interview, Page said that "their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor." His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said,"From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business.

So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually." Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks", (actually a line plotter) served as the president of the HKN, and was a member of the solar car team.

After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got". Page then 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.

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