Jelani Nelson
Theoretical Computer Scientist, Anthropic; Professor, UC Berkeley (on leave)
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Jelani Nelson is a theoretical computer scientist known for his work on streaming and sketching algorithms — methods that process massive datasets using very little memory. He earned his BS, MEng, and PhD at MIT, taught at Harvard from 2013 to 2019, and then became a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, where he served as Chair of the Computer Science Division. In 2011 he founded AddisCoder, a summer program teaching algorithms to Ethiopian high school students that has become a remarkable talent pipeline to institutions like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. In July 2026 he took a leave of absence from Berkeley to join Anthropic as a theoretical computer scientist. His honors include the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Key Contributions
- Developed foundational results in streaming and sketching algorithms, including optimal bounds for dimensionality reduction and the count-distinct problem
- Founded AddisCoder (2011), a free summer coding academy that has trained hundreds of Ethiopian high school students in advanced algorithms
- Co-founded the David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute to increase African-American doctoral recipients in mathematics
- Served as Chair of the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley after faculty roles at Harvard and Berkeley
- Joined Anthropic in 2026, bringing theoretical computer science depth to a frontier AI lab; honored with the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award and PECASE
Videos & Interviews
Dr. Jelani Nelson in Conversation with Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan at the UCB Newton Series
A UC Berkeley Newton Series conversation between theoretical computer scientist Jelani Nelson and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, spanning algorithms research, math education, AddisCoder, and the startup world's collision with AI.
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Theory of Computation with Jelani Nelson - #473
TWIML AI Podcast episode with Jelani Nelson on streaming and sketching algorithms, random projections and dimensionality reduction, what the theorist's toolbox offers machine learning practitioners, and his nonprofit AddisCoder.
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Garry Tan
In conversationPresident & CEO, Y Combinator
At Berkeley's Newton Series the algorithms theorist sat down with the head of Y Combinator, and the two traced their acquaintance to Twitter, where Tan kept retweeting Nelson's posts about how high schools teach math. The conversation keeps returning there from both sides: Tan says that if his Fremont high school had scrapped its honors track freshman year, almost nothing in his life he is thankful for would have happened. An algorithms researcher and a maker of founders, agreeing that who gets to build is often decided in a ninth-grade math class. The conversation is on this site.
youtube.com
Terence Tao
KindredProfessor of Mathematics, UCLA
A reading, not a record of collaboration. In 2021 Nelson co-wrote the open letter against the California Mathematics Framework's push to limit advanced math in middle school, and Tao was among its roughly 1,800 signatories. Tao skipped five grades and took university mathematics at nine — the extreme case of the acceleration the letter defends. Nelson argued the same case from the other end: as a fight over who gets a ladder, not over who is exceptional.
sites.google.com · en.wikipedia.org
Grant Sanderson
KindredMathematician & Educator (3Blue1Brown)
Two kinds of on-ramp into the same mathematics. Nelson built AddisCoder, a summer program teaching algorithms and programming to Ethiopian high school students that grew from one classroom into a national program; Sanderson built 3Blue1Brown, which gives millions of strangers a way into hard ideas through animation. Read together, both work from the premise that rigor is not the barrier — the missing ramp is. Sanderson also signed the 2021 open letter Nelson co-wrote against limiting advanced math in California's schools.
sites.google.com · youtube.com
