Bill Gates did graduate study in math and computer science as a first-year undergraduate at Harvard College, and published the fastest pancake-sort algorithm (held the record for 30 years), before dropping not to start Microsoft. And of course he invented Microsoft's early technology, which advanced the state of the art. He was highly likely to be a great computer scientist if he chose to stay in school.
I can read both the Gates-Papadimitriou paper and Simons' work, and it doesn't compare. Maybe Gates could have been a great scientist, who knows, but no matter how many advanced classes he took, he never was. It doesn't even matter if he got good grades in them.
