Anna Patterson: How did she do that?

Ever drink a few glasses of Merlot and mutter to yourself, "I could have created that Google search engine!" Keep boozing. Meet Anna Patterson. She engineered the Google search engine while working for the empire and has invented a new engine called Cuil. (It's Irish for knowledge and pronounced like "cool.") A quick peek at Patterson's look -- while at Stanford, left, courtesy of the college database -- shows that she wasn't doing beer bongs and flat ironing her hair on Friday nights.

According to her bio, she was a research associate to Formal Reasoning Group in the Computer Science Department at Stanford and her interests included: programming languages, concurrency and verifications and analysis of distributed systems. Her side interest? Visualizing structures using 3-D imaging techniques.  (Cuil!)

Photo: www.formal.stanford.edu