Washington:
The death of Rajeev Motwani, India-born Stanford professor and the mentor and adviser of top internet firms like Google and PayPal, was a case of accidental drowning, police said on Friday, ruling out the possibility of any murder.
Police concluded its investigations into the case after the autopsy report released by the San Mateo County Coroner's Office revealed that Motwani's blood alcohol level was 0.26 when he died as against the permissible driving level of 0.08.
San Mateo County Corner Robert Foucrault termed it as an "unfortunate accident".
The news of sudden death of 47-year-old Motwani, whose body was found in the backyard swimming pool of his Palo Alto home, on June 5, had sent shock waves across the Silicon Valley.
Motwani's friends said, he did not know swimming.
"It is difficult to know what effect a given alcohol level will have on a person because tolerance varies from individual to individual," Foucrault said.
"It was a contributing factor but the cause of death was drowning," he said, adding there would be no further investigation of the death.
Motwani was the master brain behind several of the key advancement in the world of internet including Google and PayPal.
Describing Motwani, as his friend and teacher, Google founder Sergey Brin wrote on his blog: "Whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it."
"Rajeev remained a friend and advisor as he has with many people and startups since. Of the entire faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched."
As founder of the Mining Data at Stanford Project (MIDAS) he helped developing innovative data and management concepts.
He was well known for his research in theoretical computer science, Motwani was a winner of the Godel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.
A student of the prestigious St Coloumba's School in New Delhi, Motwani was born in Jammu and Kashmir on March 26, 1962.
After earning his Bachelors in Computer Science in 1983, he came to the US to get his Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Berkeley in 1988. Soon thereafter he joined Stanford.
Motwani was one of the co-authors of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, which became the basis for Google's search techniques.
He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Terry WinogradHe.
He wrote two books - Randomised Algorithms and an undergraduate textbook which was published in 2001.