Monday, June 8, 2009

Rajeev Motwani died he was 47


Rajeev Motwani died he was 47. Motwani was a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was an early advisor and supporter of companies including Google and PayPal, and a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.
Rajeev Motwani was born in Jammu & Kashmir. His father was in the Indian Army. He has two brothers. As a child, inspired by luminaries like Gauss, he wanted to become a mathematician.
(March 26, 1962 – June 5, 2009)

He went to St Columba's School, New Delhi. He completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1983 and got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1988.

Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. 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, the basis for Google's search techniques. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with those same authors.[1]
He was also an author of two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0521474658, with Prabhakar Raghavan) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000, with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman).
Prior to his involvement with Google, Motwani 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, and computational drug design.
He was an avid angel investor and had funded a number of successful startups to emerge from Stanford, including Google. He sat on the boards of Google, Kaboodle, Mimosa Systems, Adchemy, Baynote, Vuclip, NeoPath Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007), Tapulous and Stanford Student Enterprises among others. He was also active in the Business Association of Stanford Entrepeneurial Students (BASES).[2][3][4]
He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.[5][6]
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.


Motwani, and his wife Asha Jadeja, had two daughters named Naitri and Anya.[7]
Motwani was found dead in his pool in the backyard in his Atherton home on June 5, 2009, after apparently falling in, but the cause of death is not certain. He could not swim, but was planning on taking lessons, according to his friends.[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]

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