Larry and Sergey are smart visionary people, no doubt, but PageRank was known (not that that name) since the &#x27;50s, and even applied during the 80&#x27;s to academic references (offline hyperlinks, if you think about it ...).<p>I&#x27;m not sure who deserves the credit for figuring out the meaning of the stationary distribution of a markov chain (that it exists follows from the Perron Frobenious theorem and may have been known before that), and I don&#x27;t know who first applied it to references&#x2F;hyperlinks - but it wasn&#x27;t Larry and Sergey