Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco. Work In 1998, Nielsen received his PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico. In 2004, he was recognized as Australia's "youngest academic" and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland. During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Alongside Isaac Chuang, Nielsen co-authored a popular textbook on quantum computing, which has been cited more than 36,000 times as of December 2019. In 2007, Nielsen shifted his focus from quantum information and computation to “the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication”, including the Polymath project with Timothy Gowers, which aims to facilitate "massively collaborative mathematics." Besides writing books and essays, he has also given talks about open science. He was a member of the Working Group on Open Data in Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Nielsen is a strong advocate for open science and has written extensively on the subject, including in his book Reinventing Discovery, which was favorably reviewed in Nature and named one of the Financial Times' best books of 2011 by the . In 2015 Nielsen published the online textbook Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and joined the Recurse Center as a Research Fellow. He has also been a Research Fellow at Y Combinator Research since 2017. In 2019, Nielsen collaborated with Andy Matuschak to develop Quantum Computing for the Very Curious, a series of interactive essays explaining quantum computing and quantum mechanics. With Patrick Collison, he researched whether scientific progress is slowing down. Nielsen resides in San Francisco. Bibliography This book is based on themes that are also covered in his essay on the Future of Science. (Review of Information: The New Language of Science (2003) by Hans Christian von Baeyer). References External links Michael Nielsen's account on Twitter Personal website of Nielsen 1974 births Living people Science bloggers Open content activists Theoretical physicists Australian textbook writers Quantum information scientists California Institute of Technology fellows Fulbright alumni