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Rajeev Motwani, the Indian-American computer science professor at Stanford University has found dead  in a swimming pool accident at California home. Motwani mentored Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were graduate students.

Motwani was computer science Graduate from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and then done his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley. As a Stanford professor, he also served as the director of graduate studies for the computer science department and founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS).

Motwani was well known for his research in theoretical computer science and was a winner of the Godel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation. His work had a major impact on the field of algorithms, and he used his knowledge of that field to develop methods for searching almost infinite archives of data by randomly selecting subsets of the data.

Motwani helped many Valley startups gain a foothold, but none so famous as Google, whose cofounder Sergey Brin mourned him Saturday. "I want him to really be remembered well. It's a rare combination to have somebody who is so smart and also such a nice guy," Brin told Mercury News on the phone.