Jelani Nelson: The Ethiopian-American Scientist Behind the Algorithms That Power Big Tech
Jelani Nelson is the Ethiopian-American computer scientist whose streaming algorithms power Google and Facebook, and who flew back to Addis to teach high schoolers to code
Every time Google counts how many unique visitors landed on a page, or Facebook tracks distinct IP addresses in a data stream, there's a good chance an algorithm Prof. Jelani helped build is doing the work. The UC Berkeley professor's research doesn't make headlines the way AI chatbots do, but it sits quietly inside the infrastructure that keeps large-scale digital systems running.
Prof. Jelani was born in Los Angeles to an Ethiopian mother and an African-American father, then grew up in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He taught himself to code the way a lot of curious kids did in the early internet era: right-clicking on a webpage, seeing "view source," and going from there. By 11, he was writing HTML. By high school, he had moved on to C and C++.
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