Stanford professor found dead in his Atherton pool

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The apparent drowning death of Atherton resident Rajeev Motwani, 47, a computer science professor at Stanford University, is under investigation after his body was found at 12:30 p.m. Friday, June 5, floating in his backyard swimming pool, a San Mateo County deputy coroner said today.

The coroner’s office is investigating whether Mr. Motwani — last seen at about 1:30 a.m. at his house — died because of a pre-existing medical condition, but a conclusion as to the time and cause of his death is likely to be weeks away, a coroner’s office spokeswoman said.

Mr. Motwani did not know how to swim, friends said, according to a June 6 press release issued by the university.

The statement describes Mr. Motwani as renowned for his academic research and for assisting Silicon Valley start-ups, including Google.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a June 5 blog entry, called Mr. Motwani his unofficial academic adviser at Stanford, and his contributions to computer-science “brilliant.”

The statement goes on to quote friend and Stanford computer-science colleague Balaji Prabhakar, who credits Mr. Motwani with devising formulas by which computers could retrieve information from huge and unwieldy databases, such as the entire Internet. His “randomized algorithms” succeeded by searching random subsets of the database, Mr. Prabhakar said.

He was also “an extraordinary listener who left students and young entrepreneurs enthused and more focused on their goals,” Mr. Prabhakar said, adding that “he moved effortlessly between campus the business maze of the valley.”

Mr. Brin said as much in his blog entry. Though Mr. Brin was one of hundreds of computer-science graduate students, he noted that Mr. Motwani found time to support him and Google co-founder Larry Page as they took on technical and organizational challenges that would lead to Google.

“Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly,” Mr. Brin said. “Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched. Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.”

According to the university, Mr. Motwani was born in Jammu, India, and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1983. He earned his doctoral degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988.

He is survived by his wife, Asha Jadeja; two daughters, Naitri and Anya; and two brothers. The university is planning a public memorial service.

(Bay City News Service contributed to this report.)