Taking on a top typer: Harvard professor Jelani Nelson

As the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Jelani Nelson’s research is focused on the type of algorithms used to improve spam filters or sort through large data sets. But he also happens to be a blazing fast typist, once scoring as high as 170 words per minute. To see how fast he is, we pitted him against a Harvard Gazette writer, with predicable results.