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Michael Nielsen        

A physicist turned writer, Michael Nielsen believes online communication and collaboration tools are revolutionizing the way we make scientific discoveries.

Michael Aaron Nielsen is a writer living just outside Toronto, Canada. Before, he was an academic in physics.

He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at Caltech, was Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow at the University of Queensland, 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.

His book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, published by Princeton University Press, was released in October 2011.

This book is based on themes that are also covered in his essay on the Future of Science. 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.

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