THE WORLD PORTAL

RAJEEV MOTWANI

The Indian American computer science professor Rajeev Motwani has died on 5th June, 2009 in a swimming pool accident. His body was found in the backyard swimming pool of his Palo Alto home in California and reason for his death is unknown. Motwani was known to be the master brain behind several famous advancements in the world of internet including Google and PayPal. He was also served as the special adviser of Sequoia Capital. He was the co-author of the book,” Randomized Algorithms”, published by Cambridge University Press and also co-author of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, which became the basis for Google’s search techniques.

BIOGRAPHY

Rajeev Motvani was born in Jammu and grew up in Delhi. His father was in the Indian Army, and he has two brothers. He did his graduation in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1988. He was married to Asha Jadeja and they have two daughters Naitri and Anya. He was an Indian-American computer science professor at Stanford University. As a Stanford professor ,he has also served as the director of graduate studies for the computer science department and founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS) and also connected with Google, Mymosa System, Baynote, Paypal Kaboodle, adchemy and vuclip. As an Academic, he was also very interested in databases and data mining, web search and information retrieval, robotics, Optimization and scheduling problems, particularly for applications in computer systems, compilers, and databases, computational biology and automated drug design, design and analysis of algorithms with emphasis on approximations, online computations, and randomized algorithms, as well as related complexity theory and theoretical computer science. His work had a great impact on the field of algorithms. In the field of data mining that he made some of his important contributions. That field is the basis of much of modern internet commerce and the operation of search engines such as Google. For his work, he was received a lot of awards including the ‘Arthur P. Sloan Research Fellowship’, ‘the National Young Investigator Award’ from ‘the National Science Foundation’, ‘the Bergmann Memorial Award’ from the ‘US-Israel Bi national Science Foundation’, Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur, Okawa Foundation Research Award, Godel Prize for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation and also won an ‘IBM Faculty Award’. He was also served on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on computing, journal of computer and system sciences, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. In broadly speaking, the world is really missed this extraordinary computer genius.

DINARA SAFINA

World No.1 ranked player Dinara Safina is again failed to capture one Grand Slam title. She was defeated by her countrywoman Svetlana Kuznetsova with the score 6-4, 6-2 in the final of the 2009 French Open. Though she has been the runner-up in the previous three Grand Slam singles tournaments, but she never gained any Grand Slam title in the single tennis tournament. She won the woman’s doubles title at the 2007 US Open with Nathalie Dechy and also the winner of Olympic silver medal in woman’s singles in Beijing Olympics.

BIOGRAPHY

Dinara Safina was born in Moscow, Russia in 1986. Her father Mikhail is director of the Spartak tennis club in Moscow and her mother Rauza Islanova was her trainer. She is the younger sister of former world number one tennis player Marat Safin. She was started her professional tennis career in 2002 and entered into the top 100 position. In 2002, she gained her first WTA title by defeating Henrieta Nagyova in the final. In the same year, she was defeated Silvia Farina and reached into the top 20. In 2003, she won her second WTA title and the same year she was also reached the fourth round of the US open, and she was defeated by Magdaleba Maleeva in Quarterfinals. At the 2004 Australian Open, she was finished for the first time in top 50. Dinara was won the singles title at Open Gaz de France, beating Amelie Mauresmo. Dinara Safina and Elena Dementieva, won the Fed Cup 2005 doubles. She was defeated World No.1 Maria Sharapova in the quarterfinals of the 2005 Kremlin Cup. She was defeated some big players like Kim Clijsters, Elena Dementieva, and Svetlana Kuznetsova. At the 2006 French Open, Safina entered in the quarterfinals for the first time in her career. In the fourth round, she was beat fourth-seeded Maria Sharapova 7–5, 2–6, 7–5. In the third set, she trailed 1–5 but won after almost 2 hours of play. Safina won her debut tournament in 2007, in Gold Coast, Australia, defeating Shahar Pe’er 4–6, 7–6 (1), 6–1 in the semifinal and Martina Hingis 6–3, 3–6, 7–5 in the final. She was also won the women’s double title at the US Open with Nathalie Dechy 6–4, 6–2. In 2007 Safina won the US Open Women’s Doubles with partner Nathalie Dechy. In 2008 US Open, she was seeded sixth and was one of five women who could have taken the World No. 1 ranking, depending on their results in this tournament. In the quarterfinals, she defeated sixteenth-seeded Pennetta but lost in the semifinals to the eventual winner, Serena Williams, 6–3, 6–2 and finished into the top 5. Safina was also entered the doubles competition at the Summer Olympics with Kuznetsova and this pair won the silver Medal in this competition and ranked within the top five best female tennis players. At the French Open, she entered in her first Grand Slam final , but she was lost to Ana Ivanovic in the final. At the 2009 French Open, Safina advanced to the quarterfinals dropping just five games, defeating Anne Keothavong 6-0, 6-0, Vitalia Diatchenko, 27th seeded Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, and Aravane Rezai. In the quarter final, she was defeated Victoria Azarenka and also beat Dominika Cibulkova in the semifinal. However, in the final, she was defeated by her countrywoman Svetlana Kuznetsova with the score 6-4, 6-2, and she lost the chance of winning one Grand Slam title. Many tennis players like Justine Henin criticized Safina about her No. 1 ranking because she has not won a major title. She is an energetic base liner and her primary weakness is her mental toughness, particularly in Grand Slam finals. Her emotions on court can unfavorably affect her game. She is also considered as one of the most healthy and fit tennis players in the world.