Jeff Bezos tells funny story about time in college he realized physics wasn’t for him: VIDEO

Amazon CEO Jeff
Bezos.
Reuters

• During an interview at The Economic Club of Washington,
  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told a funny story about the time in
  college when a friend helped him with a difficult math
  problem.
• “That was the very moment when I realized I was never
  going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos
  said. 
• The friend he mentioned, Yasen
  Rajakarunanayake, responded on Twitter, saying it was “amazing”
  that Bezos remembered the interaction after 34
  years. 

Even the richest man in the world struggled with his math
homework back in the day.

During a recent interview at The
Economic Club of Washington, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told
the crowd about the time a friend helped him with a difficult
math problem while he attended Princeton.

After Bezos struggled with the math problem, a partial
differential equation, for three hours, he visited his
friend, Yasantha Rajakarunanayake. Without writing anything
down, Rajakarunanayake solved the equation in seconds.

“He brings us into his room, he sits us down, he writes out three
pages of detailed algebra, everything crosses out, and the answer
is cosine,” Bezos told the audience. “And I said,
‘Listen, Yasantha, did you just do that in your head?’ And
he said ‘No, that would be impossible. Three years ago, I solved
a very similar problem. And I was able to map this problem onto
that problem, and then it was immediately obvious the answer was
cosine.'”

“And that was an important moment for me: that was the very
moment when I realized I was never going to be a great
theoretical physicist,” Bezos said, as the audience laughed.

Rajakarunanayake, who Bezos described as “the smartest guy at
Princeton,” saw the video of the interview and responded on
Twitter, saying it was “amazing” that Bezos remembered the
interaction after 34 years. 

Watch the full
interview with Bezos here.