My friends Ziggy and Alicia have been nice enough to let me stay with them during my visit to Boston. They are a wonderful couple. Ziggy is a math professor at Tufts University, where we used to work together, and his wife Alicia is an English professor at Bentley College.
Alicia told me a great story yesterday. Ziggy and Alicia have a friend, with the name of Misha Brin, also a mathematician at the University of Maryland. There was this time, several years ago, that Ziggy and Alicia were visiting Misha, and Sergei, his 11-year-old son, was there. Alicia was surprised because little Sergei would spend all day talking about computers. Alicia, who doesn't know much about computers, asked him why he liked computers so much, and little Sergei, very seriously, answered: "because you can store all the world's information in them". This could be just an outrageously nerdy answer in an 11-year-old boy, but in this case it wasn't. The boy, at 11, wanted to store all the world's information in computers, and he appears to be doing exactly that. Because years later, together with a friend, little Sergei founded a small computer company you might have heard of. Its name is Google.
