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Michael Nielsen
I'm a scientist. I helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. I also have a strong side interest in artificial intelligence. All are part of a broader interest in ideas and tools that help people think and create, both individually and collectively. [bio, cv]
I work as a Research Fellow at the Astera Institute.
My online notebook, including links to many of my recent and current projects, can be found here. This is more up-to-date and complete than this webpage (which will eventually be deprecated).
Many of my technical papers can be found here.
Want to hear about my projects as they're released? Please join my announcements mailing list.
Books
- Quantum Country: An introduction to quantum computing and quantum mechanics. Presented in a new mnemonic medium intended to make it almost effortless to remember what you read.
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning: Introduction to the core principles.
- Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science: How collective intelligence and open science are transforming the way we do science.
- Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
Selected recent projects
Selected projects
Tools for Thought
The Quantum World: An Introduction
The Quantum World: Research
Nearly all my quantum papers can be found here. Here's a few that may be of (slightly!) broader interest:
- When can one entangled state be transformed into another?
- A review: majorization and quantum entanglement
- How to understand quantum computing as free fall in a curved geometry. And some preliminary investigations into how that curved geometry works.
- Quantum teleportation: teleporting a quantum state from one end of a molecule to the other
Artificial Intelligence
- Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning
- Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal? (spoiler: yes!)
- The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation
- Distill: A machine learning journal aimed at clear exposition. I'm a founding member of the Steering Committee.
Open Science and Collective intelligence
- Massively Collaborative Mathematics
- Open science now! (short overview talk)
- The Future of Science
- The New Einsteins Will be Scientists Who Share (short op-ed)
- Doing Science Online
- Is Scientific Publishing About to Be Disrupted?
- Open Access: a Short Summary
- Science Beyond Individual Understanding
- The Economics of Scientific Collaboration (about managing the scarcity of expert attention, not about money!)
- The Mismeasurement of Science
- Shirky's Law and why (most) social software fails
- Kasparov Versus the World
- Three Myths about Scientific Peer Review
Fun miscellanea
- How the Bitcoin protocol actually works
- How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours (done for fun, later used by TinEye to crawl billions of images)
- Lisp as the Maxwell's equations of software
- If correlation doesn't imply causation, then what does?
- The Physical Origin of Universal Computing
- The Google Technology Stack
- Non-technical and technical blogs