Rajeev Motwani

Rajeev Motwani
Rajeev Motwani in 2006
Born	(1962-03-26)March 26, 1962 Jammu, India
Died	June 5, 2009(2009-06-05) (aged 47) Atherton, California, United States
Fields	theoretical computer science data privacy web search robotics computational drug design
Thesis	Probabilistic Analysis of Matching and network flow Algorithms (1988)
Doctoral advisor	Richard M. Karp
Doctoral students	Gagan Aggarwal David Arthur Moses Charikar Chandra Chekuri Mayur Datar Michael Goldwasser Sudipto Guha Piotr Indyk David Karger Krishnaram Kenthapadi Sanjeev Khanna Gurmeet Manku Shubha Nabar Liadan O'Callaghan Rina Panigrahy Steven Phillips Dilys Thomas Eric Torng Sergei Vassilvitskii Suresh Venkatasubramanian Ying Xu An Zhu
Notable awards	Gödel Prize
Spouse	Asha Jadeja
Website theory.stanford.edu/~rajeev

Rajeev Motwani (Hindi: राजीव मोटवानी; March 26, 1962 – June 5, 2009) was a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was an early advisor and supporter of companies including Google and PayPal, and a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.

Rajeev Motwani was born in Jammu and grew up in New Delhi. His father was in the Indian Army. He had two brothers. As a child, inspired by luminaries like Gauss, he wanted to become a mathematician. Motwani went to St Columba's School, New Delhi. He completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1983 and got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 under the supervision of Richard M. Karp.

Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. He founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search, robotics, and computational drug design. He is also one of the originators of the Locality-sensitive hashing algorithm.