Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) 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 .