Networks of probability
Devavrat Shah arrived at Stanford University as a graduate student in computer science in 1999, just a few months after a couple of other students in the department, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, received $25 million in financing for a company that they’d started in a friend’s garage, which they called Google. “The first time I met someone from outside Stanford,” Shah says, “the guy said, ‘Oh, so you’re a PhD in the computer science department? What’s the name of your startup?’”Shah, now an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, had grown up in Vadodara, a city that he describes as “small by Indian standards — only two million people.” While his father and grandfather had been professors of mechanical engineering and chemistry, respectively, most of his relatives had gone into business or finance, with considerable success. “I always thought that, since I come from, basically,...