Daniel Spielman

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Daniel Spielman (born March 1970 in Philadelphia) is a Yale University professor of applied mathematics and computer science. He has been at Yale since 2006 and is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science, co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, and chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science.

He earned a BA in mathematics and computer science from Yale in 1992 and a PhD in applied mathematics from MIT in 1995 under Michael Sipser, with the thesis “Computationally Efficient Error-Correcting Codes and Holographic Proofs.” He taught at MIT from 1996 to 2005 before joining Yale.

Spielman, often with Shang-Hua Teng, has won many prizes: the Gödel Prize (2008, 2015) for work on smoothed analysis and nearly linear-time Laplacian solvers; the Nevanlinna Prize (2010); and he was named an ACM Fellow (2010). He became a Simons Investigator (2012) and a MacArthur Fellow (2012). In 2013, with Adam Marcus and Nikhil Srivastava, he solved the Kadison–Singer problem, earning the 2014 Pólya Prize. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 and won the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2022. He was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2026.