Jelani Nelson

@minilek53k followers

Member of Technical Staff @AnthropicAI. On leave from @Berkeley_EECS. Founder @addiscoder. Posts are personal views. 🇻🇮🇺🇸🇪🇹

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Posts 88 posts

#	Date	Post	↓ Outlier	Views	Likes	Reposts	Bookmarks
1	Oct 19, '24	This tweet reminds me of an MIT Police alert all students got back in 2011.	201×	1.5M	21k	683	1.9k
2	Mar 23, '24	In the midst of this “reckless disregard for accuracy” thing, I’d like to point out that despite what her Instagram page might suggest, she actually has no affiliation with the Sta	121×	891k	1.5k	90	159
3	Apr 5, '22	A @Stanford professor just threatened me with police. After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel. Public advisory: don't call the c	85×	0	16k	2.5k	758
4	Mar 6, '24	@elonmusk and @sama may not agree on much of late, but do agree AI is built on strong math foundations, including algebra and calculus, applauding @UofCalifornia for recent clarifi	81.3×	601k	862	179	271
5	Dec 22, '24	"Students in upper-track math courses are no smarter or better at math than others. But their families have managed to give them a jump-start through additional after-school progra	72×	532k	2.4k	130	483
6	Jan 25, '24	2+ yrs ago I co-authored a letter warning not offering Algebra I in public middle schools was anti-equity, as the wealthy could go private. Yesterday I discovered a great example:	65.2×	482k	2.7k	453	340
7	Sep 7, '23	Me paying for items at a Berkeley Walgreens this morning while watching a shoplifter walk right out the front door with stolen goods… Cashier yells: “you know I’m going to have to	64.6×	477k	783	79	27
8	Dec 3, '23	My 5-year old says she wants to be a professor, so I took her to my office for a preliminary interview. I think she’s ready, what do you think?	44.8×	331k	2.8k	66	68
9	Jan 15, '23	The Harvard admissions website no longer mentions data science (source: , compared with just 2 months ago). Universities are more deeply looking into these courses and realizing th	42.3×	313k	466	47	77
10	Oct 16, '25	At @Berkeley_EECS we always work to keep our curriculum fresh. Our intro ML course CS 189 just got a drastic makeover this semester (thanks @profjoeyg @NargesNorouzi!) and now incl	35.8×	265k	811	94	699
11	Jan 5, '23	Students making me blush w/ course evals "This man is insane on the blackboard – it's like he's pouring out knowledge." "Berkeley has a lot of great professors, but something is re	29.1×	215k	1.5k	34	96
12	Sep 9, '23	Not hard to imagine how this happens. After buying our house, we wanted a custom bookshelf. 1st quote: $9000+installation+tax. Final contract: $1743 total (diff. vendor). >80% c	27.1×	200k	654	33	34
13	Feb 21, '23	Why has the desire to make math more accessible, for many folks, translated into wanting to get rid of calculus? Pedagogical debates should not create confusion on what content is	26.9×	199k	704	64	70
14	Mar 10, '25	From @ylecun on greencard/visa revocations and deportations of scientists.	26.3×	194k	2k	248	469
15	Feb 1, '25	~7 yrs ago I asked an ML faculty member to explain transformers+attention to me — not just the math, but the motivation. What they described was not nearly clear as the below video	25×	185k	2.1k	179	2.1k
16	Jul 12, '23	WHOA. Friday, the UC submitted public comment to the State Board of Ed saying changes were coming to admissions reqs. They've now come: "BOARS, which consists of representatives fr	23.9×	176k	235	35	18
17	Apr 5, '22	It is horrifying that the CMF claiming to uplift black children was co-authored by a person who finds police intimidation against blacks acceptable. I encourage concerned alumni an	21×	0	5.2k	336	24
18	Nov 14, '25	“Grades on high-school transcripts too often bear little relationship to a student’s mastery of crucial skills: A student may have graduated with an A in calculus yet lack the capa	20×	148k	1.4k	162	136
19	Apr 5, '22	To be clear, what I retweeted is not misinformation, not private, and not harassment. It's a screenshot from the public record. See for yourself: page 376 of	19×	0	4.9k	224	31
20	Apr 2, '24	This saga has now entered the realm of the absurd. ‘Beckles frequently collaborates with fellow Brit Jo Boaler, the Stanford mathematics education professor who played a key role i	18.6×	138k	484	93	113
21	Jul 7, '23	The California State system is, I believe, the largest university system in the USA (by enrollment). Its systemwide academic senate has published a formal resolution stating the UC	16×	118k	281	52	28
22	Jan 6, '24	Ackman says he’s going to review all MIT faculty’s work for plagiarism. What I find silly about this is …in many fields (my own?), my hunch is plagiarism isn’t really a popular f	15.3×	113k	295	13	52
23	Mar 20, '23	It's about the crime frequency. I lived 16 yrs in Greater Boston and can't remember anyone I personally knew who was the victim of any crime. Then since moving to the Bay <4 y	15×	111k	299	23	8
24	Mar 2, '25	Happy Adwa Victory Day! 129 years ago, Italian military forces attempting to colonize Ethiopia were completely annihilated in the Battle of Adwa by the Ethiopian Imperial Army, und	14.5×	107k	1.9k	384	67
25	May 10, '25	From an article yesterday... in a high school student newspaper, written by a teenager in Oregon.😳 Out of the mouths of babes. "Boaler didn’t meaningfully address the flaws in her	14.4×	106k	706	111	128
26	Feb 8, '25	Incorrect calculation. 60% indirect cost rate means for every dollar charged to the grant for the project, the university charges an additional 60 cents as overhead. So it’s 60/1	14.2×	105k	618	50	83
27	Dec 6, '23	It's clear these (non-?)answers were written by lawyers, which is a failure mode I've seen often: leaders forgetting that they lead, and that general counsel's job is only to...c	14.2×	105k	312	19	39
28	Mar 29, '24	This is opinion article in the @latimes by the editorial board is quite poor quality, for multiple reasons: 1) It cites a letter to the Regents by the Cal Black Engineering and Sci	13.5×	100k	245	34	37
29	Nov 24, '23	View post on X	13.3×	98k	265	22	35
30	May 5, '25	Looking again at this video, something I want to highlight: The people pushing for dumbing down math say they want to do it for 'equity', and invoke helping black students as their	12.2×	90k	526	95	82
31	Jul 1, '25	Today is my first as department chair at @Berkeley_EECS When I left Harvard 6 yrs ago, I just saw it as moving from one great place to another. Then, it hit me at a state school I'	11.6×	85k	1.1k	30	56
32	May 31, '23	Happy 100th birthday to my grandpa, who has been my model for perseverance and grit, from training to be an army doctor for WW2 (@HowardU ‘47), to running a successful hog farm in	11×	81k	276	5	8
33	Dec 28, '22	I'm not the first to say this, but I'll repeat: an interesting thing about differential privacy is it needs theorems even in practice. You can implement heuristic algs that are fas	10.3×	76k	310	24	25
34	Apr 2, '23	I had seen this, but didn’t realize the author is black. tl;dr Rex pays $ for workarounds for his granddaughter to be able to take advanced math in SF, i.e. black families finding	10.3×	76k	255	56	18
35	May 6, '24	Rest in peace to my grandfather, who lived a long and honorable life. Passed in his sleep at the age of 100. Someone needs to make a movie about his life, because he had so many un	10.1×	74k	528	20	40
36	Oct 4, '23	A new theorist is born. (Thank you @SimonsInstitute!)	9.6×	71k	789	4	5
37	Mar 31, '25	A new strongly poly-time algo for negative-weight shortest paths, O~(m sqrt(n)) time, by my colleague Satish Rao. This is the same problem Bellman-Ford, which we teach to undergrad	9.6×	71k	279	43	122
38	Feb 26, '25	AddisCoder had a State Department grant cancelled. The weirdest part of this: AddisCoder has no, and never has had, any federal grant, from the State Dept or from anywhere else. So	9.5×	70k	316	21	44
39	Aug 29, '25	Garry and I pushed in this video to stop AB 500 and AB 1217. As of today, both bills are now dead. The people are awake, and the tides are turning. Our elected leaders destroying K	9.0×	66k	327	34	36
40	Oct 3, '25	I’ve also been integrating LLMs into my research workflow. I spent most of Tuesday working on a problem I’ve been thinking about for a while with some collaborators. I had a conjec	8.6×	63k	278	17	124
41	Sep 18, '25	Very impressive! 8-9 yrs ago Jakub was a postdoc in my group, and we wrote a very nice paper together on an interesting streaming data structure lower bound (maintain a dynamic mul	8.5×	63k	424	9	109
42	May 1, '24	It blows my mind that as SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza got rid of 8th grade Alg 1 for all students in SFUSD in the name of equity, then in his subsequent job as NYC Dept of	8.5×	62k	309	42	24
43	Aug 2, '25	Just imagine how much more fulfilled her life would have been if she had waited until 14 to learn algebra.	8.4×	62k	858	41	47
44	May 21, '23	Six years of marriage and three kids later (one in the belly!). Life couldn’t be better. ❤️ Happy Sunday all!	8.2×	61k	733	7	4
45	Mar 23, '23	🙏🏽	8.2×	60k	348	8	0
46	Dec 2, '24	Vivek doesn't understand overhead rates. x% overhead means for every $1 spent for direct costs, an extra x cents goes toward overhead. An overhead rate of 70% means .7/1.7 =~ 41% g	8.1×	60k	267	18	39
47	Apr 15, '25	Founder of the most successful tech startup accelerator on Earth advising founders to start their companies outside the USA. Those now in Washington don’t fully comprehend the dama	7.8×	58k	645	46	54
48	Jun 16, '24	View post on X	7.7×	57k	637	17	25
49	Mar 28, '24	It dawned on me, @Stanford really needs to outsource the Boaler investigation to a neutral third party, and they need to make it clear that they are doing so. Why? 1. If the resear	7.6×	56k	229	43	26
50	Jul 28, '25	In Texas, the State Board of Education brought in a university math professor to provide input on K-12 math education. In California, officials ignored letters signed by hundreds o	7.2×	53k	287	35	31
51	Dec 16, '23	My son is thankful for the new diaper bag! #NeurIPS2023	6.8×	50k	292	4	7
52	Mar 28, '25	This is so incredibly silly. The Justice Department is claiming “DEI in admissions” is hurting Asians at e.g. UC Berkeley. But Prop 209 has mandated race-blind admissions at the UC	6.6×	49k	298	22	22
53	Mar 23, '24	@animesh_garg She is a professor at Stanford. She is not in the mathematics department.	6.2×	46k	353	0	6
54	Jan 25, '23	Someone said something today that really resonated with me: "global warming cannot be solved by eliminating thermometers". Indeed, and achievement gaps in education cannot be overc	6.2×	46k	254	34	11
55	Feb 23, '23	I grew up on Code Jam. RIP.	6.1×	45k	328	10	9
56	Jul 1, '24	Started a new role today. Excited to serve our fantastic students, staff, researchers, my faculty colleagues, and all else in our community!	5.9×	44k	685	8	6
57	May 19, '24	7-year anniversary ❤️	5.8×	43k	495	2	10
58	May 3, '25	Between arguing that buying sex from 16 year olds shouldn't be a felony, the childhood literacy fiasco, and bills supporting dumbing down K-12 math education, I'm really having a h	5.5×	40k	257	17	16
59	Mar 2, '22	"Maximum Flow and Minimum-Cost Flow in Almost-Linear Time" A very big congratulations to the authors!	5.3×	0	791	172	148
60	May 25, '24	Excited to be the speaker at this year’s Stanford Math Commencement Ceremony! Last year’s speech by @3blue1brown will be a tough act to follow, but if I do a tenth as well then I’l	5.0×	37k	350	10	22
61	Jun 29, '24	“mathematical breakthroughs are not powered solely (or even primarily) by ‘Eureka’ moments of genius, but are in fact largely a product of hard work” —Terry Tao	4.7×	34k	497	72	114
62	Jul 27, '24	We only @flyethiopian 🇪🇹	4.5×	33k	605	36	7
63	Jul 27, '24	Off to AddisCoder — little one’s first Ethiopia trip.	4.5×	33k	596	9	10
64	Apr 4, '24	Honored to be given the chance to serve my state by providing testimony to the California State Senate Committee on Education in support of SB 1411, sponsored by @SenOchoaBogh, whi	4.4×	32k	266	18	11
65	Mar 13, '25	The impact of federal research funding. 👇🏾 The first line item alone is probably more than the total NSF allocation aggregated across all its directorates, over all years combine	4.3×	32k	295	33	38
66	Sep 10, '24	😆	4.1×	30k	407	10	32
67	Jan 3, '25	Fresh ቆጮ for New Year’s!	4.0×	30k	229	3	8
68	May 4, '25	Somehow still claiming 2 of the top 3 most popular videos ever on Harvard's official YouTube channel. So many people interested in van Emde Boas trees!	3.9×	29k	501	9	54
69	Mar 31, '22	The proposed CA Math Framework states improving math learning for black students as central motivation and has 0 black authors. Instead, one author has alarmingly lucrative consult	3.9×	0	675	133	31
70	Feb 27, '24	Whoa. Somehow missed this until today.	3.8×	28k	234	20	127
71	Jun 28, '24	40	3.8×	28k	551	2	11
72	Sep 14, '22	I've been a theorist working on algorithms in the academic ivory tower for 17 years. Last summer I started part-time in industry 1 day per week (@Google); this is fairly common amo	3.7×	0	712	47	118
73	Jan 25, '24	“threatened to call” is future tense Her words were “…is now being taken up by police…”, which suggested the call had already been made. She later backtracked and claimed the whole	3.6×	27k	387	8	11
74	Mar 31, '22	I've spent 1000+ hours setting up/contributing to educational programs for the benefit of black kids for free (, , DHBSRI). Total I've made: $0 (actually negative, since I sometime	3.6×	0	848	55	19
75	Dec 22, '24	I've run high school summer camps in Ethiopia for 13 years now in which the bulk of participants come from low income families Here's one of our students, Yosef, talking about @tim	3.6×	26k	262	9	15
76	Apr 25, '25	Rule of law prevails.	3.6×	26k	336	23	30
77	Jan 12, '25	I know almost nothing about the wildfires, but the one issue I dug deep into (the recent math framework) destroyed my confidence in Newsom. In its aftermath, people tried to fix th	3.4×	25k	252	36	38
78	Mar 1, '24	Happy Adwa Victory Day. An African victory heard around the world. The Atlanta Constitution, March 4 1896: "This is the second crushing defeat that the Abyssinians have inflicted u	3.3×	25k	391	117	18
79	Jun 9, '25	Yonas Bekele is a public high school student in Ethiopia, admitted to the United World Colleges with a 90% scholarship. But the 10% left (+ registration deposit) comes out to rough	3.0×	22k	242	53	20
80	Aug 30, '23	I recently accepted an invitation to give a lecture at @SpelmanCollege. I had heard that my great grandmother Elizabeth C. Towns taught there but didn't know the details, so I cont	3.0×	22k	245	12	11
81	Dec 22, '24	He had never heard of the SAT/TOEFL until we told him not long before he took it. He studied for it reading resources himself on his smartphone and got a perfect 800 on the math su	2.8×	21k	471	11	9
82	May 8, '24	🎯	2.8×	21k	226	34	20
83	Aug 2, '25	Terence Tao, perhaps the most famous living mathematician, explains the damage the recent grant cuts to UCLA has caused especially due to its impact on IPAM (the Institute for Pure	2.7×	20k	245	48	38
84	Dec 22, '24	Now years later, Yosef has degrees from MIT and works in tech. From the YouTube link above, good thing for Yosef, he lived in a community that showed him love and support, and did	2.7×	20k	616	17	16
85	Apr 21, '23	Breakfast with a legend! @SossinaHaile @HaileManas @educateethiopia	2.7×	20k	261	3	2
86	Dec 22, '24	His family income was ~$65 USD/mo and parents never attended college. His dad was a security guard and mom stayed at home. The only reason he owned a smartphone in high school is b	2.6×	19k	282	6	6
87	Jun 8, '23	Berkeley CS theory group now offering shuttle service between Simons and Soda Hall…?	2.5×	19k	259	3	3
88	Nov 10, '22	MIT wins the ICPC World Finals in Dhaka. First North American team to win since 1997! @jcvbcn	2.2×	0	508	30	13
89	Nov 7, '22	Team Andalus, Adama Science and Technology University 🇪🇹. First Ethiopian team to participate in the ICPC World Finals. 🇧🇩	1.9×	0	425	28	4
90	Mar 21, '22	Don't track everyone downward and claim a false equity victory. The rich can maneuver around attempts at tracking everyone downward, as they did in San Francisco by paying for extr	1.9×	0	373	56	7
91	May 17, '25	Eight years.	1.8×	13k	285	0	3
92	Jun 16, '24	Found out my childhood barber from the Virgin Islands has a barber son in the East Bay, so I took my son to get a haircut from my barber’s son. :)	1.7×	13k	373	4	5
93	Jun 29, '22	This arrived today in the mail on my birthday. Fantastic birthday present!	1.6×	0	376	11	9
94	Sep 24, '22	Well, in CA 58% of Asian kids take Calculus in high school vs 6% of black kids. Is math not nutrition for the brain? It is misguided to respond to these numbers by suggesting remov	1.5×	0	335	33	3
95	Sep 12, '22	እንኳን ለአዲሱ ዓመት በሰላም አደረሳችሁ Dinner on Ethiopian New Year with two new professors about to start at MIT, Prof. Iwnetim Abate (Materials Science & Eng.) and Prof. Loza Tadesse (Mec	1.4×	0	358	17	3
96	Apr 26, '22	A new open letter authored by some colleagues stresses the importance of broad math education for data science, open to be signed by academic staff at California colleges/universit	1.4×	0	222	55	20
97	Jan 20, '25	መልካም ጥምቀት	1.3×	9.4k	266	0	4
98	Sep 24, '22	Thought of the day: some kids were showing up to school hungry and underperforming, whereas others were well fed, so the USDA launched the School Breakfast Program to equalize the	1.2×	0	250	27	9
99	Mar 8, '22	If 'projective geometry' is in your talk title, you should have a little fun with the slides ...	1.2×	0	279	10	11
100	Oct 17, '22	As I look into kindergartens for my daughter next year, I've noticed every school's website emphasizes its commitment to diversity. Yet at least one such Oakland private school is	1.0×	0	232	8	4

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