Word: mathes
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...complex way so that any one of them would on average beat one of the others. He was one of three people I ever showed them to who figured this out and saw the way to win was to make me choose first which one I'd roll." (For math buffs: the dice were nontransitive. One of the others who figured it out was the logician Saul Kripke...
...ninth grade," Gates recalls over dinner one night, "I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam. That established my independence and taught me I didn't need to rebel anymore." By 10th grade he was teaching computers and writing a program that handled class scheduling, which had a secret...
...spirit of the Harvard football-team manager he once was. "Bill lived down the hall from me at Harvard sophomore year," he says. "He'd play poker until 6 in the morning, then I'd run into him at breakfast and discuss applied mathematics." They took graduate-level math and economics courses together, but Gates had an odd approach toward his classes: he would skip the lectures of those he was taking and audit the lectures of those he wasn't, then spend the period before each exam cramming. "He's the smartest guy I've ever met," says Ballmer...
...child, Ho had his math tables drilled into him in Mandarin, and to this day he does his calculations in Chinese. "But," he says, "I wouldn't even have the vocabulary to give a scientific talk in Chinese." He plays down the importance of being Chinese to his success--but that is a very Chinese thing to do. Instead, he cites immigrant drive: "People get to this new world, and they want to carve out their place in it. The result is dedication and a higher level of work ethic." He adds, "You always retain a bit of an underdog...
...personal profile, we turned to senior editor Howard Chua-Eoan, who has much in common with Ho. Both are immigrants (Chua-Eoan from the Philippines, Ho from Taiwan) and eldest sons. They share two Chinese dialects (Fujian and Mandarin), and both still do math in their head in Chinese...