Michael Nielsen
Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) is a writer living just outside Toronto, Canada. In 2004 he was characterized as Australia's "youngest academic" and secured a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland; the fellowship of $235,000 per annum was for five years. He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at Caltech, and a Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Nielsen obtained his PhD in physics in 1998 at the University of New Mexico. With Isaac Chuang he is the co-author of a popular textbook on quantum computing. In 2007, Nielsen announced a marked shift in his field of research: from quantum information and computation to “the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication”. This work includes "massively collaborative mathematics" projects like the Polymath project with Timothy Gowers. Besides writing books and essays, he also gives talks about Open Science. He is a member of the Working Group on Open Data in Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation.