February 15, 2007 | Thursday

Even Sergey Brin has embarrassing parents

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Search Engines |Google |Search Technology

That’s not the only thing you’ll take away from this pleasingly in-depth profile of the Google co-founder (link via John Battelle), but reading about one of his folks’ bickering sessions is one of the funnier things about the piece.

It’s unprecedented for a journalist to have access to Brin’s family, let alone access that appears to be pretty unrestricted, and the tales of why and how his father took his family from the horrors of the Soviet Union to America are as interesting as the rest of the piece. Of his stint working for the Soviet government’s central planning agency, Brin Snr says:

I was trying to prove that, in a few years, living standards in Russia would be higher than in the United States. And I proved it. I know enough about math to prove whatever you want.

His family’s background with the cruel and authoritarian Communist government has, Sergey says, had a major effect on him:

“My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow,” Sergey says, adding, “I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”

This obviously calls into question how Brin could have approved the search giant’s cooperation with the totalitarian Chinese government, a decision explained thusly in the article:

Ever the computer geeks, Schmidt said they actually worked up an “evil scale.” To their minds, operating a censored Google site in China was a lesser evil than providing spotty, substandard service from outside the country. The outcome also happened to favor the profit motive.

It seems that the father’s ability to prove “whatever [he] want[s]” with maths has been passed on to the son.