<story><title>Mathematics at Google </title><url>http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38331.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>Seeing PageRank discussed reminds me of a piece of fun trivia.  The idea for PageRank came out of the success of the Science Citation Index, which ranks papers according to how often they have been cited.  The idea of trying to study the structure of citations in academia came out of people who were inspired by a 1948 essay, &lt;i&gt;As We May Think&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;But that essay&apos;s main topic was an imagined technology called memex, to be implemented with an automated indexing system and microfilm.  This technology is the first description of hypertext, which inspired multiple technologies.  The second successful consumer application that I&apos;m aware of that used hypertext was the web.  (The first was HyperCard from Apple.)&lt;p&gt;Thus Google started as the application of one set of techniques inspired by &lt;i&gt;As We May Think&lt;/i&gt; to a technology that was also inspired by &lt;i&gt;As We May Think&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/?single_page=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...&lt;/a&gt; for the essay itself.  Do keep in mind that it was written one year after the transistor was invented, but the author already had 2 decades of experience with computing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mathematics at Google </title><url>http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38331.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>j2kun</author><text>Look at the slide entitled Gmail (5), and compare the picture with the first graph on my blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/the-perceptron-and-all-the-things-it-cant-perceive/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/the-perceptron-and...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It just goes to show, Google steals content without attribution just like everyone else.</text></comment>