Bill Gates didn't stay at Harvard University for long — dropping out after three semesters to found Microsoft in 1975 — but he was there long enough to make an impression.
Gates' former applied mathematics professor Harry Lewis, for example, remembers the future billionaire as being inquisitive and "mature" beyond his years, with a tendency for questioning adults and tackling difficult problems.
"He always wanted a challenge," Lewis, who has taught at Harvard since the 1970s, told The Times of London in an interview that published last week. "I wasn't surprised when he dropped out — I just wish I'd invested in him."
Gates left Harvard early to launch Microsoft, which was then a startup in the nascent software industry. Microsoft ultimately turned Gates into a billionaire by age 31. It now has a market value of nearly $3.2 trillion, and Gates' estimated net worth is $108.7 billion, according to Forbes.
If Lewis had invested $100 in Microsoft when the company went public in 1986, his shares would be worth roughly $650,000 today, after accounting for price appreciation and dividend payouts, according to a CNBC analysis.
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As a college student, Gates was surrounded by students whose math skills surpassed his own, giving him something of a wake-up call, he told The Times. He "nearly killed" himself by loading up on extra classes while spending hundreds of hours per month writing software code in the university's computer lab, he said.
"It was, 'Oh s---, there may be people better than me at math,'" said Gates, whose upcoming memoir "Source Code," largely about his life pre-Microsoft, is set to publish next month.
Gates may have questioned his own math skills while at Harvard, but the tech pioneer also could have been a professional mathematician "if he wanted to," Lewis told NPR in 2008.
In one specific moment, Gates' precocious curiosity and eagerness to take on a challenge made him stand out, even among his gifted peers, Lewis told The Times: "The first day [of class] I showed them the pancake problem [a mathematical sorting question involving different-sized pancakes] and two days later he came back to show me he could do it better."
Gates' solution was published in an academic paper in 1979. "The problem remained pretty much in that state for 30 years," Lewis told NPR, until some researchers finally improved upon Gates' method in a 2008 research paper.
Ironically, those researchers were enabled by the development of the computer industry, which Microsoft was partially responsible for. "They never could have actually done the case analysis were it not for the computer industry that Bill Gates built in the intervening 30 years," said Lewis.
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