Bill Gates away half of its value, as detailed in "The Power of Half". Gates and his wife invited Joan Salwen to Seattle to speak about what the family had done, and on December 9, 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates, and investor Warren Buffett signed a commitment they called the "Giving Pledge." The pledge is a commitment by all three to donate at least half of their wealth over the course of time to charity. Gates has also provided personal donations to educational institutions. In 1999, Gates donated $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the construction of a
Bill Gates 2014. In his second year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates' solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou. Gates did not have a definite study plan while he was a student at Harvard, and he spent a lot of time using the school's computers. Gates