Motwani, Google mentor, drowns

Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford University who mentored Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were graduate students, has died from a freak drowning accident at his Atherton, California, home.

Motwani, 47, apparently drowned on Friday morning in a backyard swimming pool of the house he bought three years ago. His friends said he did not know how to swim but was planning to take lessons.

The news of his death struck like a thunderclap in Silicon Valley. Blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter posts were filled with testimonials to a brilliant, kind man who was never too busy to help a budding entrepreneur or struggling graduate student.

Motwani helped many Valley startups gain a foothold, but none as famous as Google. “I want him to be remembered really well. It’s a rare combination to have somebody who is so smart and also such a nice guy,” Brin said. “He had a lot of interest in computer science theory. He’s primarily a theoretician, and it’s incredible the amount of impact he has had directly on products and companies.”

Motwani is survived by wife Asha Jadeja and daughters Naitri and Anya.

The family will hold a private funeral, but a memorial service will be held at a later date.
While little official information was available, friends speculated that Motwani might have slipped and fallen in the pool. Paramedics were called when his body was found, and he was pronounced dead at the scene at 12:28 pm.

Born on March 26, 1962, in Jammu, Motwani grew up in New Delhi, earned a computer science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, in 1983, and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988.

As a professor at Stanford, he also served as director of graduate studies for the computer science department and founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS).

His work had a major impact on the field of algorithms, and he used his knowledge of that field to develop methods for searching almost infinite archives of data by randomly selecting subsets of the data. It was in the field of data mining that he made some of his seminal contributions. The field is the basis of much of modern internet commerce and the operation of search engines such as Google.