Business
Bill Gates
Co-founder of Microsoft
Born 1955
Photo: Dati Bendo · CC BY 4.0
«Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.»
Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and built it into the company whose Windows and Office software runs most of the world's personal computers. Since 2000 he has devoted most of his time and fortune to the Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charity, focused on global health and education.
Key achievements
- Co-founded Microsoft in 1975
- Built the world's largest private charitable foundation
Universities
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Enrolled in 1973, took Math 55 and graduate-level computer science courses, and left in 1975 to found Microsoft.
Facts
- At Harvard he took Math 55, the university's notoriously hard first-year mathematics course, and lived in Currier House, where his neighbour down the corridor was Steve Ballmer, later Microsoft's CEO.
- As a second-year student he solved an open problem in pancake sorting with professor Christos Papadimitriou; the paper was his only academic publication, and its bound stood for more than 30 years.
- He left in 1975 after he and Paul Allen saw the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics and wrote a BASIC interpreter for it before they had even touched the machine.
- Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2007; he opened his commencement speech by telling his father that he had always promised to come back and get his degree.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.