
Ask HN:  Is Bill Gates smart? - roadnottaken
A colleague of mine is meeting Bill Gates in the near future and is pretty nervous about the interaction (a lot of money is at stake).  As such, my co-workers and I have been discussing whether or not Bill Gates is extremely smart?  Just lucky?  Both?  Is it pure drive/ambition?  Has anyone out there interacted with him enough to know if he's smarter than your average really-smart-person or if it's just some combination of right-place-at-the-right-time and reasonable intelligence.  Opinions?<p>Would you be more/less nervous to meet him than other extremely successful CEOs (e.g. Jobs, Brin, Zuckerberg, etc)?
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oldstrangers
I'm having trouble grasping the relevancy of this question. But regardless of
that, how could you not consider the man smart? Steve Ballmer might be lucky,
but Bill Gates is most certainly a very smart and talented man.

I would also add that it's not his intelligence that would intimidate me, but
more so his wealth of experience. His bullshit detectors are probably off the
charts, considering that he's heard and seen every business pitch known to
man.

If I was your friend I would just try to be as honest and upfront as possible.
You're not going to sell Bill Gates on anything, but you can convince him
you're someone that's worth dealing with.

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acqq
Also consider how much he must optimize his attention compared to other
people:

<http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html>

He simply has to think differently than most.

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cpr
I was a classmate of Gates (he was a year behind me). We took some CS classes
in common, and had a passing acquaintance.

Let me assure you he's smarter than your average really-smart-person. He's
also more determined. ;-)

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grasshoper
He had to do Math 55 to realize that there were people smarter than he was.
Not too many people can readily appreciate what this means. I think you have
to have participated in national-level math competitions to be able to
understand the quality of person it takes to do this.

It reminds of the line from Good Will Hunting where the Professor says that
only a handful of people in the world were smart enough to even tell the
difference, even though it was grand, between himself and Will.

If your definition of a 'really-smart person' is someone who can ace the SATs
or get into Harvard, then you probably won't be able to tell the difference
between such a person and Bill Gates. There is a world of difference between
the level of intelligence required to ace the SATs and level required to
handle Math 55.

~~~
hga
Math 55 rates its own fairly detailed Wikipedia article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55>

For graduate study, _US News and World Report_ currently ranks it a hair under
MIT, along with Princeton, Stanford and UCB ([http://grad-
schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...](http://grad-
schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-mathematics-
programs/rankings)). Harvard has been strong in math for a _long_ time.

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edw519
_A colleague of mine is meeting Bill Gates in the near future and is pretty
nervous about the interaction..._

A colleague of ours (HN name spolsky) met with Bill Gates in the past and was
pretty nervous about that interaction:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html>

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jchonphoenix
Gates is smarter than most people you'll ever meet. As a freshman, he proved
tighter upper and lower bounds on the pancake sorting problem than had
previously existed.

Yes, his professor told him in class that X was the tightest bounds currently
in existence. He came back a few days later and said "I'm pretty sure I have
faster." He was right.

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skowmunk
Around 5 years ago, I read an interview given by Bill Gates. In that, the
inteviewer remarked about Gates' reputation for having in-depth knowledge on
diverse subjects. And the interviewer asked, if Gates could just understand
anything and everything.

I don't recall the exact wording of it, but this is the gist of it as I
recall:

"I read a lot, on very diverse subjects. There are a lot of things that I do
not understand at first read. But irrespective of whether I understand it or
not, I complete reading them. Then I re-read them. I re-read to the extent
that I want to understand them in depth."

Also, he claimed in the interview that he completely avoids watching TV, that
he instead spends time reading.

May be that is the secret to his smartness.

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dmlorenzetti
The New Yorker had an article about Gates' involvement in fighting malaria in
Africa (synopsis:
[http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/24/051024fa_fact_sp...](http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/24/051024fa_fact_specter)).

That article paints Gates as extremely quick. For example, it recounts an
episode (touched on in the synopsis) where Gates was given a reading list by
somebody who was used to potential donors wanting to get involved. Unlike most
of them, Gates came back having read and synthesized most if not everything on
the list.

I don't remember much about that article anymore, but I remember coming away
from it thinking a lot more highly of him, both in terms of his intelligence
and his willingness to use his skills in the service of others.

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PonyGumbo
I met him maybe ten years ago, and the one thing I would say to your colleague
is that he has _zero_ tolerance for BS. If you're pitching him, you have every
reason to be nervous.

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waynecolvin
After reading the Wikipedia article and so forth, yes the man was smart.

For instance it says he was writing business software as a teenager. It also
says that Altair BASIC was initially written on an emulator, which was itself
written by him! We're already at the clever and talented point right there.

"He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT[19] and enrolled at Harvard College..."
isn't a perfect indicator but suggestive also. He might have had other breaks
in life but smarts would have been one of them.

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sz
If Math 55 is any indication, yes.

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bwooceli
Hi Mr. Gates. Don't worry; we all still think you're very very smart.

~~~
roadnottaken
LOL! I wish :)

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leibniz
As a lower bound, you can have a look at this joint paper with Christos
Papadimitriou from 1976:
[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/papers/Bounds%20For%20S...](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/papers/Bounds%20For%20Sorting%20By%20Prefix%20Reversal.pdf)

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taphangum
Yes, very smart. But your friend shouldnt be intimidated. Every good
entrepreneur has the potential to make moves as smart or even smarter than
Bill Gates did.

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smackfu
Definitely technical: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC>

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fleitz
You have to be smart to be lucky and lucky to be smart.

