How smart is bill gates?

By Justin Jones Last updated Jun 30, 2022

How smart is bill gates? Bill Gates’ mathematical prowess during his time as a student at Harvard in the 1970s left a lasting impression on more than one member of the teaching staff.

His ideas were published in the journal Discrete Mathematics in 1979, in a paper co-bylined with Christos Papadimitriou, who was a professor at Harvard at the time. His solution to the problem, which is referred to as “pancake sorting,” was described as elegant.

How smart is bill gates?

In a conversation held on Tuesday in New York City with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bill and Melinda Gates fielded questions from members of the audience, fans watching live, and even Mark Zuckerberg, who sent in a question via Facebook: “If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be? Asking for a friend.”

Gates, whose success can be attributed in large part to his proficiency in mathematics, has stated that he wishes he had understood that genius does not come in a single form: “I was so clueless about the many types of skill sets. My preconceived notion was that someone with a high IQ would be capable of excelling in any endeavor they attempted. The concept that you needed to combine skills from a variety of domains was something that never ceased to amaze me.

The self-made billionaire came to the realization that there are numerous forms of intelligence, and that discovering which kind best suits you is essential to achieving success.

In 2017, he tweeted, “Intelligence may manifest itself in many different ways.” “It does not exist in a single dimension. And not nearly as significant as I had previously believed.”

Howard Gardener, a psychologist who worked in the 1980s, discovered nine distinct forms of intelligence. This infographic, which was designed by Mark Vital of Funders and Founders, highlights the benefits that may be gained from each sort of intelligence.

Visualizing the world in three dimensions (spatial)
To be a naturalist means to have an understanding of living things and to study nature.
Recognizing sounds in terms of their pitch, tone, rhythm, and timbre is a musical skill.
Logical and mathematical: assigning numbers to things, developing hypotheses, and demonstrating how true they are
Taking up the existential concerns of why we are here and why we will one day die.
Interpersonal: understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of other people
The process of synchronizing mental and physical activity through the movement of the body
Finding the appropriate words to convey what you intend is an aspect of linguistics.
Understanding oneself, including how you feel and what you want, is referred to as being intra-personal.

You will be able to stop comparing yourself to others and discover the work environment that suits you best if you first determine and then accept the sort of intelligence you possess. In addition to this, you will be more aware of the abilities that it is possible that you will need to develop.

Melinda responded to Zuckerberg’s inquiry by stating that if she could give her younger self some advice, it would be to “Trust yourself.” It’s likely that you know more than you give yourself credit for.

In a publication that was distributed by the Association for Computing Machinery a number of years ago, Papadimitriou, who is now a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, related a story about his time spent collaborating with Bill Gates. The topic was brought up again in a recent response to the question on Quora that asked, “How intelligent is Bill Gates?”

The tale serves as a timely reminder that those among us who have achieved the greatest levels of riches and success may have been extraordinary from the very beginning of their lives.

Here’s Papadimitriou:

Bill was a junior at Harvard when I started working there as an assistant professor. My girlfriend at the time stated that I had mentioned to her that there is an undergraduate student at our institution who is the most intelligent person I’ve ever encountered.

During that academic term, Gates was completely captivated with a mathematical problem known as pancake sorting: How can you sort a list of numbers, for example, 3-4-2-1-5, by changing the order of the prefixes in the list? You can switch the first two digits to get 4-3-2-1-5, and then you can switch the first four numbers to get 1-2-3-4-5 to finish it off. Just a couple of turns.

However, nobody understood how to achieve it with less than 2n coin flips when working with a list of n numbers. Bill stopped by my office to share an idea he had for completing the task using a total of 1.67n flips. We validated his algorithm and established a lower constraint, demonstrating that it cannot be completed in fewer than 1.06n iterations. We dominated the pancake sorting industry for decades while we held the record. When I was younger, it seemed like a pointless problem, but later I learned that human chromosomes can alter in this manner, so it became significant.

Two years later, I gave him a call to tell him that our manuscript had been accepted by a journal that specializes in excellent mathematics. He came out as extremely uninterested in the conversation. He had relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to take over the leadership of a small company that, of all things, specialized in creating code for microprocessors. I can vividly recall thinking: “What a great youngster. What a silly waste.”

After a period of thirty years, more researchers came up with a method of sorting that is one percent quicker. However, as stated in an interview conducted by NPR with Harry Lewis, an additional Harvard professor who instructed Gates throughout the 1970s, those researchers had the assistance of powerful computers. On the other hand, young Bill Gates depended completely and exclusively on his own mental resources (and in fact, he helped develop the computers that would find a faster solution).

These reminiscences are easy to brush off as outliers to the general norm, which states that anyone can become successful even if they were not geniuses when they were 20 years old.

However, a rising body of evidence reveals that intelligence is a remarkable good predictor of wealth and success later in life.

Jonathan Wai, a professor at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program, published a study in 2013 that found the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs and billionaires had attended an elite academic institution either as undergraduate students or as graduate students. This placed them in the top 1 percent of cognitive ability. Wai’s study can be found here. According to Wai’s findings, even among the wealthiest 0.0000001% of people, those with higher incomes had, on average, higher levels of education.

According to more recent research conducted by Wai, almost forty percent of a sample of one thousand nine hundred and one CEOs attended excellent schools, which most likely indicates that they were in the top one percent of cognitive capacity. Wai also discovered that businesses with CEOs who had a higher level of education tended to have greater overall performance. Because prestigious institutions will only accept students who have achieved high SAT scores, Wai thinks that this indicates a high level of intelligence. This is because high SAT scores are typically correlated with higher levels of intelligence.

Wai’s methodology and conclusions have been criticized, for example by Steve Siebold, the author of “How Rich People Think.” Wai admits that he would have preferred to gain access to people’s SAT scores if that was possible, and he acknowledges that he has received criticism for both his methodology and his conclusions.

Wai admitted in an article published on Business Insider that “it might be that the power of the networks, brand name, and quality of education that come with elite-school attendance is why so many of these people ended up in such positions of influence.” Wai was referring to the fact that elite schools are known for producing graduates who have strong networks, strong names, and high levels of education.

Another small study, this one conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University, found that 320 students who had scored above the 1-in-10,000 level on the SAT before the age of 13 held more prestigious jobs at more prestigious companies by the time they were 38 than the rest of the population on average does at that age.

Even Bill Gates has conceded that there may be a connection between IQ and professional achievement. In 2005, he gave the following interview to Forbes, in which he said, “Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we will not have a future.”

It is unsettling to contemplate the possibility that an individual’s intelligence may play a part in their accomplishments that is greater than trivial. The conclusion that can be drawn from these studies and tales, however, is not that, if your IQ isn’t off the charts (at least according to established measurements of intelligence), you won’t or won’t be able to succeed in life. It just feels like the odds of you being the next Bill Gates are much lower. Statistically speaking.

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