The maths behind Google’s page ranking
David Austin penned this article, which is currently being featured by The American Mathematical Society. The article details how Google’s PageRank algorithm works, which can be summarised as:
The fundamental idea put forth by PageRank’s creators, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, is this: the importance of a page is judged by the number of pages linking to it as well as their importance
The article is fascinating to read and Austin does an excellent job illustrating the workings of the algorithm using mathematical forumulae, diagrams and some examples.