Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) is an Australian-American quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.

In 2004, he was recognized as Australia's "youngest academic" and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland.

[4] During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

[2] Alongside Isaac Chuang, Nielsen co-authored a popular textbook on quantum computing,[5] which has been cited more than 52,000 times as of July 2023.

[11][12] In 2015 Nielsen published the online textbook Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and joined the Recurse Center as a Research Fellow for a year.