Lars Rasmussen (software developer)

Lars Rasmussen
Lars Rasmussen in 2007 Photo credit: Charlie Brewer
Residence	London
Nationality	Danish
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Google, Facebook
Alma mater	Aarhus University University of Edinburgh University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Alistair Sinclair
Known for	Google Maps, Google Wave
Notable awards	Pearcey Award (2010)

Lars Eilstrup Rasmussen is a Danish-born computer scientist, software developer, and co-founder of Google Maps.

In 1990, Rasmussen graduated from the University of Aarhus with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. He gained his MSc in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Edinburgh in 1992.

Rasmussen began his PhD, working with Mark Jerrum and Alistair Sinclair in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at Edinburgh, then moved, with Sinclair, to Berkeley, California, USA. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998, for his thesis "On Approximating the Permanent and Other #P-Complete Problems".

In 2003, Lars and his brother, Jens, with Australians Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, co-founded Where 2 Technologies, a mapping-related start-up in Sydney, Australia. This company was bought by Google in October 2004, to create the popular, free, browser-based software, Google Maps. The four of them were subsequently employed by Google in the engineering team at the company's Australian office in Sydney. Lars and Jens are also the originators of the Google Wave project.

On 29 October 2010, Rasmussen announced that he had left Google, and was moving to San Francisco to work for Facebook. At Facebook he was, among other things, the engineering director for the Facebook Graph Search project which is a semantic search engine for the social network. In 2013 he and were listed as number 79 in The 100 Biggest Stars In Silicon Valley by Business Insider. Rasmussen had been working in the Facebook London office.