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Stanford Prof And Google Backer Rajeev Motwani Dies

By TEAM VCC

  • 08 Jun 2009

In a shocking development, Rajeev Motwani, the Stanford professor who had been one of the seed investors in Google, was found dead in his home in Palo Alto, California. His body was found in the swimming pool at his backyard, according to Dan Stober, Director of Media Relations at Stanford University.

The cause of the death of the 47-year old professor is not known. Motwani apparently did not know how to swim but was planning to take lessons. He had moved into the house three years ago with his wife (Asha Jadeja who is running Dot Edu Ventures) and two daughters.

Motwani had taught Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and had also backed them providing a part of the startup capital in the initial stages of the company. Motwani has been invloved with scores of startups and also been part of venture community in the Silicon Valley.

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Motwani was born in New Delhiu in 1962. He went IIT Kanpur and graduated from there in 1983 and received his doctorate from University of California, Berkley, in 1988.

Motwani's research interests include databases, data mining, information retrieval, and web searching. The other topics include computational and combinatorial geometry with applications to robotics and vision; computational biology and automated drug design. Design and analysis of algorithms with emphasis on approximations, online computations, and randomised algorithms, as well as related complexity theory, according to his profile page on Stanford University website.

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