To be fair, Gates published one and only CS paper. It was on prefix sorting and shows pretty serious mastery of discrete math for his age or any age. Perhaps the co-author -- legendary algorithms professor Papadimitriou -- honed the proofs but Gates was clearly not a one-trick programming pony.

He also chased programming like a starved Tiger, doing things like looking through corporate trash bins for source listings and that sort of stuff. Not to mention that Allen was also a person of extreme intellect and Ballmer is actually a mathematician combined with a charismatic business brain and a small nuclear reactor in one.