Motwani: Math's loss is Net's gain

I'm reading The Satan Bug by Alistair McLean, and this book ends with a police officer asking the protagonist, Pierre Cavell, one pertinent question u2014 did he (the villain) fall or was he pushed? This question is relevant in this book because Cavell is a lone wolf who doesn't always play by nice rules.

A similar question can be asked of Rajeev Motwani's death. Theu00a0IIT-educated, Stanford professor who inspired the co-founders of Google and influenced a generation of computer scientists, drowned in his pool.

How did he really die? Why did he get into the pool alone if he was still learning swimming? Isn't it also funny that, like Dewang Mehta, he too died a mildly suspicious death? If one were a conspiracy theorist, then one could say that the fact that both Mehta and Motwani were born in 1962 has something to with it!
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But such conspiracy theories don't do us credit. While the Artherton police are waiting for an autopsy report on Rajeev's accidental drowning, we can look at another thing, the ability of some people to reach beyond the grave centuries after they have died and influence life today.
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No, I'm not discussing spirits or supernatural entities, I'm referring to the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who played a role in Motwani's life. According to Wikipedia, Motwani was inspired by luminaries like Gauss (1777 to 1855) and wanted to become a mathematician. Though he became an ace angel investor in Silicon Valley, somewhere deep in his mind, Gauss and mathematics would have been present.
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In some ways, this could have been responsible for the fact that Motwani, along with Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Terry Winograd, wrote a paper on the PageRank algorithm, which forms the foundation of Google's search engine. And algorithms depend extensively on mathematics, so Motwani's initial interest in mathematics would have played a strong role here.
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The two books that he has co-authored u2014 Randomised Algorithms and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, also concern mathematics to an extent. In this context, it could be said that from the perspective of all of us who can't live without search engines, it was nice that Motwani didn't become a mathematician u2014 if he had, then we would have all missed out on his contributions to Google's PageRank.
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Wikipedia says that, according to Isaac Asimov, when Gauss was in the middle of a mathematical problem, he is claimed to have said 'Tell her to wait a moment till I'm done' when he was interrupted with news that his wife was dying.