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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I've got a tech friend who enrolled his young son in the local Montessori school. He told me once about how the lobby was full of successful people who had graduated like judges, congressmen, federal government officials and heads of non-profits. I told him that Larry Page was a graduate of that school and he was astounded.

A while later he met with the headmaster and asked him why Page's picture wasn't featured in the lobby? He never got a direct answer but apparently they didn't feel that merely making a lot of money was enough of an accomplishment ;<).

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Doesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it over. And only googlers know what he has done inside the company.

Bill Gates gets a bad tech rap too, even though he was coding successful compilers himself for several years.

Gates also made a significant mathematical discovery that wasn’t bested for 30 years[1], and he published a paper on it while he was a sophomore at Harvard.

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9223678...

I am constantly thinking of ways to apply pancake sorting in a real-life environment that doesn't involve working at IHOP

Doesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it over.

Here is a video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ, of everyday people trying to explain what a browser is, a browser, the most important piece of (general use) software developed since the word processor or spreadsheet.

Try asking the general public what PageRank is, much less who invented it, and be prepared for a montage of silent deer-in-headlights responses with the occasional stammering about librarians for good measure :)

Thats is fair, and probably true. Ask somebody who larry page is, and almost everyone will know.

If not, they have heard of google. I am not sure if this guys was just ultra hipster, bitter about not getting a donation, or he literally doesn't realize that google was an inportant contribution.

Either way, society seems to disagree.

Larry and Sergey are smart visionary people, no doubt, but PageRank was known (not that that name) since the '50s, and even applied during the 80's to academic references (offline hyperlinks, if you think about it ...).

I'm not sure who deserves the credit for figuring out the meaning of the stationary distribution of a markov chain (that it exists follows from the Perron Frobenious theorem and may have been known before that), and I don't know who first applied it to references/hyperlinks - but it wasn't Larry and Sergey

I think it's more likely that Page asked them not to hang a photo of him in the lobby and the headmaster would rather make a vague, dismissive comment than risk the perception that Page didn't want to be associated with the school.

most likely page just did not wire any donations

Bollocks....by that argument, would have never though congressmen and government officials wasting a lot of money was an accomplishment.

How about building a company withs tens of thousands of people, many of whom are working on hard problems that will benefit billions of people?

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