At Princeton, Jeff Bezos had a tough time doing algebra; Twitter finds Lankan friend who helped him

Jeff Bezos didn't always plan on starting Amazon. At one point, he was just another student at Princeton, who was struggling with Algebra.

Thirty-four years on, the world's richest man recalled how he had spent 3 hours on a Math problem, unsuccessfully though. During a recent interview at The Economic Club of Washington, the Amazon boss told the crowd about the time when his college fellow helped him with Algebra.

Little did Bezos know while narrating this story that it would travel across to the person who was the answer to a young Bezos's problem: Yasantha R.


But more surprising things have happened in this digital age, and Yasantha R, who works at MediaTek and now lives in San Ramon, California (according to his Twitter bio) tweeted, "Wow! Jeff is talking about me. Amazingly he remembers interacting with me 34 years ago. What a memory! Also no Amazon if it weren't for this, since he decided not to pursue physics!"


It's been over three decades since the two fellow students, now on very different paths of life, sat in a college room - and one left the other, now the world's richest man, stumped by his answer.

Wondering how that happened? Bezos tells the story himself in the video shared on Twitter, "After struggling with the partial differential equation for hours, my roommate and I looked at each other and said, Yasantha."

"Yasantha was the smartest guy at Princeton, so we went to his room," the Amazon boss added.

Calling him one of the 'most humble, wonderful guys', who had a name long enough to fit 3 lines on Facebook - which was an actual book at the time - Bezos said, "Yasantha looked at the problem, stared at it for a while, and then he said CoSine."

A taken aback Bezos had then asked him, "What do you mean?"

So he explained that he was talking about the answer, and called them into his room to elaborate, where he wrote down 3 pages of detailed Algebra in which everything crossed out and in the end the answer was CoSine.

Surprised, Bezos said, "Did you just do that in your head?"

To which Yasantha's simple reply was that would've been 'impossible', rather he had solved a similar problem 3 years ago and just mapped the one Bezos brought to that, thus reaching to the answer.

And that, says Bezos was a 'great moment' for him, because that was when he realised that he was never going to be a great theoretical physicist.

While the story definitely left Yasantha amazed, Twitterati can't too wait to see what the Amazon boss has to say to his fellow from college, more than 3 decades later.