Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin, born on August 21, 1973 in Moscow, Russia, is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who created, along with Larry Page, the online search engine Google, one of the most successful sites on the Internet.

The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow. In 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Mikhail Brin announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father was "promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, afraid their request would be denied. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.

Brin’s family moved from Moscow to the United States in 1979. After receiving degrees (1993) in computer science and mathematics at the University of Maryland, he entered Stanford University’s graduate program, where he met Page, a fellow graduate student. The two were both intrigued by the idea of enhancing the ability to extract meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dormitory room to devise a new type of search technology that leveraged Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Brin received a master’s degree in 1995, but he went on leave from Stanford’s doctorate program to continue working on the search engine.