About
Rajeev Motwani
Rajeev Motwani was a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.Rajeev was a luminary
in many academic disciplines. He made fundamental contributions to the foundations of computer
science, search and information retrieval, streaming databases and data mining, and robotics. In
these areas, he considered questions as philosophical as what makes problems inherently
intractable, and as practical as finding similar images and documents from a database. His text
book, Randomized Algorithms, with Prabhakar Raghavan, epitomizes this meeting of the abstract
and the concrete, and has been a source of inspiration to countless students. He has received
many awards for his research; notably, the Gödel Prize, and the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation
Research Fellowship. Rajeev’s academic legacy extends to teaching and advising a large number of
students, many of whom have gone on to successful academic careers.
In addition to his academic accomplishments, Rajeev was a legendary figure in Silicon Valley. He
was an early investor and technical advisor for many ventures, and mentored dozens of young
enterpreneurs. In the words of one of those young enterpreneurs, Sergey Brin, “Today, whenever
you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind
it.”
