Sal Khan

Salman Amin "Sal" Khan (born 11 October 1976) is an American educator and the founder of Khan Academy, a free online non-profit educational platform with which he has produced over 6,500 video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects, originally focusing on mathematics and science. ¹ He is also the founder of Khan Lab School, a private in-person school in Mountain View, California. ¹ In 2012, Khan was named in the annual Time 100 list. ¹

Khan was born in Metairie, Louisiana, on 11 October 1976, into a Bengali Muslim family; the Arabic article describes him as born and raised in New Orleans, of which Metairie is a suburb. ^{1 2} His father Fakhrul Amin Khan, who died in 1990, was a physician from the village of Rahmatpur in Babuganj, Barishal, Bangladesh, while his mother Masuda Khan is from Murshidabad in West Bengal, India. ¹ His grandfather Abdul Wahab Khan was a prominent Bengali politician who served as Pakistan's third official Speaker of the National Assembly. ¹ Khan recalls growing up in financial difficulty; he knew his mother made $16,000 in 1993 because he had to do her taxes to obtain financial aid. ¹ Being born into a Muslim family is recorded here as family background; Khan's own quoted statement about his beliefs is a generic one about making the best of our finite years and being humbled by the vastness and mystery of the Universe, naming no school, and his data record therefore leaves his faith unknown. ¹

He attended Grace King High School, was a cartoonist for the school newspaper, took mathematics courses at the University of New Orleans, and graduated as valedictorian in 1994. ¹ At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he graduated in 1998 with bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and in mathematics and a Master of Engineering degree, and in 2012 he returned as MIT's youngest commencement speaker in at least thirty years. ¹ He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, graduating in 2003. ¹

In 2002 Khan was a summer intern at Xerox PARC, and from 2003 to late 2009 he worked as a hedge-fund analyst at Connective Capital Management. ¹ In 2004 he started tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics over the internet using Yahoo!'s doodle notepad; when other relatives and friends sought his tutoring, he moved his tutorials to YouTube, creating an account on 16 November 2006. ^{1 2}

The popularity of his educational videos prompted Khan to quit his job as a financial analyst in 2009 and develop Khan Academy full time. ¹ He outlined his mission as accelerating learning for students of all ages and sharing the content with whoever may find it useful, arguing that supplementing classroom education with the Academy's technology can free teachers from traditional lectures for instruction specific to individual students. ¹ The Academy added its Coach feature in 2012 and partnered with the College Board in 2015 to create free practice resources for the SAT. ¹ Khan published a book about the Academy and his education goals, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, and by 2023 Khan Academy had more than 155 million registered users. ¹ Stanford AI researcher Andrew Ng has named Khan as an inspiration for the founding of Coursera. ¹

Khan's pedagogical idea — that students learn better managing the acquisition of knowledge independently and at their own pace, then working in teams to apply it, an approach known as the flipped classroom and incorporating elements of mastery learning — is tested at Khan Lab School, founded in 2014. ¹ In early 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he launched Schoolhouse, a free non-profit initiative providing small-group tutoring worldwide through Zoom. ¹ In October 2025 TED announced Khan would become its new "Vision Steward", succeeding Chris Anderson. ¹

Khan received the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award in 2012, the Heinz Award in the Human Condition category in 2014, and the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian award, in 2016, as well as honorary degrees from Harvard, Dartmouth and Carnegie Mellon. ¹ He is married to the physician Umaima Marvi, and the couple live with their children in Mountain View, California. ¹

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