This list is incomplete, but aspires to be a list of my public projects. Projects in bold are more substantive. Note that some items in the list are the work of just a few hours – quick notes, Twitter threads, interviews I like, and so on – while others are the work of years.

• Rough note: On creativity, unselfing, and the diminishment of the selfish impulse (Michael Nielsen) 2025-11-17
• The Sacrifices We Choose to Make (Michael Nielsen) 2025-07-13
• Could Powerful AI Break Our Fragile World? (Future of Life Institute podcast) 2025-06-06
• Notes on deep atheism (Michael Nielsen) 2025-05-19
• ASI existential risk: reconsidering alignment as a goal (Michael Nielsen) 2025-04-18
• Pale Blue Dot Redux 2025-04-08
• Michael Nielsen on being a wise optimist about science and technology (Into the Bytecode podcast) 2025-03-27
• Notes on the Tao Te Ching 2024-12-02
• How to be a wise optimist about science and technology? 2024-12-01
• The trouble with 'big-picture' books: avoiding the curse of the generalist 2024-07-04
• Notes on the persistence of the four largest ancient religions 2024-06-18
• Notes on the adhan 2024-06-02
• Michael Nielsen on Collaboration, Quantum Computing, and Civilization's Fragility (Conversations with Tyler, episode 213) 2024-05-29
• Questions for Podcasts 2024-02-11
• Notes on Differential Technological Development (Michael Nielsen) 2024-01-13
• Notes on the Vulnerable World Hypothesis (Michael Nielsen) 2023-12-16
• Using memory systems to memorize text passages 2023-12-05
• Notes on Vitalik Buterin's techno-optimism 2023-11-29
• Brief remarks on some of my creative interests 2023-11-26
• Notes on Existential Risk from Artificial Superintelligence 2023-09-18
• Prefatory remarks on 'Oppenheimer' 2023-08-30
• How I use memory systems 2023-07-20
• Quick thoughts on research 2023-07-20
• How is AI impacting science? 2023-05-14
• On the status of Occam's razor 2023-04-04
• How to make memory systems widespread? 2023-02-13
• Notes on Commandments to live by 2023-01-15
• Reflections on diminishing returns in science (Twitter thread) 2023-01-09
• Discovery fiction 2023-01-03
• Exploratory notes: Community as the unit of scientific contribution 2022-12-09
• Michael Nielsen on Metascience (on the Jim Rutt Show) (Michael Nielsen and Jim Rutt) 2022-12-05
• Myth and religion, 'social technology', and deeply held belief 2022-12-01
• Interview with David Zierler for the Caltech Heritage Project (Michael Nielsen and David Zierler) 2022-11-25
• Building a better memory system 2022-11-22
• Michael Nielsen: Metascience, How To Improve Science, Open Science (Benjamin Yeoh's podcast) (Michael Nielsen and Benjamin Yeoh) 2022-11-16
• A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science (Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu) 2022-10-18
• Conversation with Ajeya Cotra and Spencer Greenberg about Effective Altruism (Ajeya Cotra, Spencer Greenberg, and Michael Nielsen) 2022-08-19
• Notes on creative context 2022-08-04
• Email thoughts on metascience 2022-07-18
• Quick notes on the Las Vegas Strip 2022-07-07
• Notes on Effective Altruism 2022-06-02
• On the role of design in science (Twitter thread) 2022-05-28
• Working notes on the role of vision papers in basic science 2022-05-28
• Cosmos: working notes, 1 2022-02-16
• The trouble in comparing different approaches to science funding (Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu) 2022-02-09
• Workshop template 2022-02-04
• In what sense is the science of science a science? 2022-01-13
• Surprising things believed by extraordinary scientists 2022-01-01
• Working notes on the Dirac equation 2021-11-19
• How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create? 2021-10-11
• Sporadica 2021-10-01
• Rough working notes on the Alcubierre 'warp drive' spacetime 2021-09-30
• Reflections on 'The Bitter Lesson' 2021-07-22
• What's more fundamental than the laws of physics? (Twitter thread) 2021-04-01
• Maps of Matter 2021-02-01
• How do scanning tunnelling microscopes work? 2021-02-01
• Spencer Greenberg: Scientific Progress and Political Feedback Loops with Michael Nielsen 2020-11-25
• Slow 2020-02-04
• The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change 2019-11-21
• How can we develop transformative tools for thought? (Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen) 2019-10-03
• Scattered notes on writing I 2019-09-26
• Discovery fiction for Hindu-Arabic numerals 2019-09-18
• Discovery fiction for quantum teleportation 2019-05-24
• Erik Torenberg: What Michael Nielsen Thinks About Basically Everything 2019-04-25
• Quantum Country (Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen) 2019-03-19
• Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics 2019-01-12
• What does the quantum state mean? 2018-12-13
• In what sense is quantum computing a science? 2018-12-12
• Science is getting less bang for its buck (Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen) 2018-11-15
• On the units of bipartite entanglement: Is sixteen ounces of entanglement always equal to one pound? 2018-10-29
• Twitter thread on the velocity of discovery 2018-10-16
• What if we had oracles for common machine learning problems? 2018-09-30
• The varieties of material existence 2018-09-18
• David Perell: Michael Nielsen: Tools for Thought 2018-07-09
• Augmenting Long-term Memory 2018-07-05
• Twitter thread on spaced repetition memory systems 2018-01-28
• Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence (Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen) 2017-12-04
• Thought as a Technology 2017-11-29
• RMNIST with annealing and ensembling 2017-11-26
• Reduced MNIST: how well can machines learn from small data? 2017-11-15
• Magic Paper 2017-11-05
• Working notes on Chalktalk 2017-09-01
• Volitional Philanthropy 2017-04-11
• How much do our elite know about human progress? 2016-12-28
• The trouble with definitions 2016-12-02
• Making invisible understanding visible 2016-04-01
• Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal? 2016-03-29
• Striking user interfaces 2016-03-01
• Notes on the Dynabook 2016-03-01
• Toward an Exploratory Medium for Mathematics 2016-02-28
• The Physical Origin of Universal Computing 2015-10-27
• Engelbart: "Augmenting Human Intellect" 2015-08-10
• The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation 2015-07-23
• Reinventing Explanation 2014-01-31
• How the Bitcoin protocol actually works 2013-12-06
• Neural Networks and Deep Learning 2013-11-25
• The Artist and the Machine 2013-02-06
• Why Bloom filters work the way they do 2012-09-26
• How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours 2012-08-10
• Lisp as the Maxwell's equations of software 2012-04-11
• How changing the structure of the web changes PageRank 2012-03-05
• How to combine multiple notions of relevance in search? 2012-02-04
• If correlation doesn't imply causation, then what does? 2012-01-23
• Open Access: a Short Summary 2011-11-30
• Open science now! 2011-11-01
• The New Einsteins Will be Scientists Who Share (short op-ed) 2011-10-29
• Reinventing Discovery: the New Era of Networked Science 2011-10-23
• Documents as geometric objects: how to rank documents for full-text search 2011-07-07
• Quantum computing for the determined (video series) 2011-06-10
• The Mismeasurement of Science 2010-11-29
• Introduction to the Polymath project and `density Hales-Jewett and Moser numbers' 2010-01-01
• A guide to the day of big data 2009-12-09
• Massively collaborative mathematics (Tim Gowers and Michael Nielsen) 2009-10-15
• Is Scientific Publishing About to Be Disrupted? 2009-06-29
• Doing Science Online 2009-01-26
• Three Myths about Scientific Peer Review 2009-01-08
• The economics of scientific collaboration 2008-12-29
• The Economics of Scientific Collaboration 2008-12-29
• The Google Technology Stack 2008-12-02
• Why Augmenting Collective Intelligence is Easier than Augmenting Individual Intelligence 2008-10-24
• Suppress innovation, but claim the credit 2008-10-22
• Science Beyond Individual Understanding 2008-09-24
• Science beyond individual understanding 2008-09-24
• More really is different (Mile Gu, Christian Weedbrook, Alvaro Perales, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2008-08-31
• Quantum Computing for Everyone 2008-08-28
• Quantum control via geometry: An explicit example (Mile Gu, Andrew Doherty, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2008-08-23
• Why the World Needs Quantum Mechanics 2008-08-04
• Shirky's Law and why (most) social software fails 2008-07-24
• The future of science 2008-07-17
• Notes on Andrew Odlyzko's "The Economics of Electronic Journals" 2008-05-29
• Rough notes on the Budapest Open Access Initiative 2008-05-29
• Science and Wikipedia 2008-05-21
• Open Science 2008-05-13
• Interrupting Google Search 2008-04-26
• Investing in undervalued human capital: the Y Combinator model 2008-03-13
• The curse of busy-ness 2008-03-13
• Creative collaboration: ideals and reality 2008-03-11
• Criticism is overrated 2008-02-27
• Why isn't University free? 2008-02-25
• Why the h-index is little use 2008-01-31
• The tension between information creators and information organizers 2008-01-24
• APIs and the art of building powerful programs 2008-01-14
• Non-abelian money 2007-08-25
• Kasparov versus the World 2007-08-21
• Micropublication and open source research 2007-08-16
• The Research Funding "Crisis" 2007-08-14
• Open Source Google 2007-08-08
• An introduction to Yang-Mills theories 2007-05-09
• The geometry of quantum computation (Mark R. Dowling and Michael A. Nielsen) 2006-12-31
• Limits to collective decision making: Arrow's theorem 2006-06-30
• Universal quantum computation with continuous-variable cluster states (Nicolas C. Menicucci, Peter Van Loock, Mile Gu, Christian Weedbrook, Timothy C. Ralph, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2006-05-23
• Quantum computation as geometry (Michael A. Nielsen, Mark R. Dowling, Mile Gu, and Andrew C. Doherty) 2006-03-19
• Optimal control, geometry, and quantum computing (Michael A. Nielsen, Mark R. Dowling, Mile Gu, and Andrew C. Doherty) 2006-03-19
• Noise thresholds for optical cluster-state quantum computation (Christopher M. Dawson, Henry L. Haselgrove, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2006-01-11
• Noise thresholds for optical quantum computers (Christopher M. Dawson, Henry L. Haselgrove, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2005-09-09
• The Fermionic canonical commutation relations and the Jordan-Wigner transform 2005-07-29
• Introduction to expander graphs 2005-06-22
• Algebraic and information-theoretic conditions for operator quantum error correction (Michael A. Nielsen and David Poulin) 2005-06-09
• Optimal photons for quantum-information processing (Peter P. Rohde, Timothy C. Ralph, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2005-05-19
• The Solovay-Kitaev algorithm (Christopher M. Dawson and Michael A. Nielsen) 2005-05-06
• Journal club on quantum gravity 2005-04-15
• Cluster-state quantum computation 2005-04-13
• A geometric approach to quantum circuit lower bounds 2005-02-11
• A simple proof of the strong subadditivity inequality (Michael A. Nielsen and Denés Petz) 2004-08-20
• Quantum computing and polynomial equations over the finite field Z₂ (Christopher M. Dawson, Henry L. Haselgrove, Andrew P. Hines, Duncan Mortimer, Michael A. Nielsen, and Tobias J. Osborne) 2004-08-20
• What's Wrong with those Quantum Cryptosystems? 2004-08-17
• What's wrong with those quantum cryptosystems 2004-08-17
• Distance measures to compare real and ideal quantum processes (Alexei Gilchrist, Nathan K. Langford, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2004-08-10
• Principles of Effective Research 2004-07-27
• Operator monotone and operator convex functions: a survey 2004-06-29
• Bloch's theorem and Bravais lattices 2004-06-10
• Technical notes on linear matrix equations 2004-06-06
• Fault-tolerant quantum computation with cluster states (Michael A. Nielsen and Christopher M. Dawson) 2004-05-23
• Simulating Hamiltonian dynamics using many-qudit Hamiltonians and local unitary control (Michael J. Bremner, Dave Bacon, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2004-05-20
• Unified derivations of measurement-based schemes for quantum computation (Andrew M. Childs, Debbie W. Leung, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2004-04-23
• Interesting problems: The Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle 2004-04-16
• Optical quantum computation using cluster states 2004-02-02
• Frustration, interaction strength, and ground-state entanglement in complex quantum systems (Christopher M. Dawson and Michael A. Nielsen) 2004-01-12
• The bits that make up the Universe 2004-01-01
• Journal club notes on the cluster-state model of quantum computation 2003-11-29
• Extreme Thinking 2003-09-07
• Entanglement, correlations, and the energy gap in many-body quantum systems (Henry L. Haselgrove, Michael A. Nielsen, and Tobias J. Osborne) 2003-08-14
• Lower bounds on the complexity of simulating quantum gates (Andrew M. Childs, Henry L. Haselgrove, and Michael A. Nielsen) 2003-07-25
• Fungible dynamics: There are only two types of entangling multiple-qubit interactions (Michael J. Bremner, Jennifer L. Dodd, Michael A. Nielsen, and Dave Bacon) 2003-07-21
• Practicality of time-optimal two-qubit Hamiltonian simulation (Henry L. Haselgrove, Michael A. Nielsen, and Tobias J. Osborne) 2003-03-11
• Ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography (Joseph B. Altepeter, David Branning, Evan Jeffrey, T. C. Wei, Paul G. Kwiat, Robert T. Thew, Jeremy L. O'Brien, Michael A. Nielsen, Andrew G. White) 2003-03-07
• Quantum states far from the energy eigenstates of any local Hamiltonian (Henry L. Haselgrove, Michael A. Nielsen, and Tobias J. Osborne) 2003-03-04
• Robustness of quantum gates in the presence of noise (Aram W. Harrow and Michael A. Nielsen) 2003-01-21
• Summer School Lectures on Quantum Information and Computation 2003-01-02
• Simple Rules for a Complex Quantum World 2002-11-01
• An introduction to majorization and its applications to quantum mechanics (draft of a book) 2002-10-18
• Quantum information science and complex quantum systems 2002-10-01
• Quantum dynamics as a physical resource (Michael A. Nielsen, Christopher M. Dawson, Jennifer L. Dodd, Alexei Gilchrist, Duncan Mortimer, Tobias J. Osborne, Michael J. Bremner, Aram W. Harrow, and Andrew Hines) 2002-08-13
• Quantum information science as an approach to complex quantum systems 2002-08-13
• Practical scheme for quantum computation with any two-qubit entangling gate (Michael J. Bremner, Christopher M. Dawson, Jennifer L. Dodd, Alexei Gilchrist, Aram W. Harrow, Duncan Mortimer, Michael A. Nielsen, and Tobias J. Osborne) 2002-07-12
• Universal simulation of Hamiltonian dynamics for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces (Michael A. Nielsen, Michael J. Bremner, Jennifer L. Dodd, Andrew M. Childs, and Christopher M. Dawson) 2002-05-31
• A simple formula for the average gate fidelity of a quantum dynamical operation 2002-05-07
• Entanglement in a simple quantum phase transition (Tobias J. Osborne and Michael A. Nielsen) 2002-02-27
• Entanglement monotone derived from Grover’s algorithm (Ofer Biham, Michael A. Nielsen, and Tobias J. Osborne) 2001-12-17
• A simple operational interpretation of the fidelity (Jennifer L. Dodd and Michael A. Nielsen) 2001-11-08
• Entanglement, quantum phase transitions, and density matrix renormalization (Tobias J. Osborne and Michael A. Nielsen) 2001-09-05
• Quantum computation by measurement and quantum memory 2001-08-06
• ROM-based computation: quantum versus classical (Benjamin C. Travaglione, Michael A. Nielsen, Howard M. Wiseman, and Andris Ambainis) 2001-08-04
• Causal and localizable quantum operations (David Beckman, Daniel Gottesman, Michael A. Nielsen, and John Preskill) 2001-06-14
• Universal quantum computation and simulation using any entangling Hamiltonian and local unitaries (Jennifer L. Dodd, Michael A. Nielsen, Michael J. Bremner, and Robert T. Thew) 2001-06-12
• Majorization and the interconversion of bipartite states (Michael A. Nielsen and Guifré Vidal) 2001-05-28
• Separable states are more disordered globally than locally (Michael A. Nielsen and Julia Kempe) 2000-11-30
• Introduction to quantum information theory 2000-11-15
• Quantum information processing (E. H. Nielsen and M. A. Nielsen) 2000-10-17
• Theory of quantum computation (E. H. Knill and M. A. Nielsen) 2000-10-17
• Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang) 2000-10-01
• Characterizing mixing and measurement in quantum mechanics 2000-08-16
• Approximate transformations and robust manipulation of bipartite pure-state entanglement (Guifré Vidal, Daniel Jonathan, and M. A. Nielsen) 1999-10-23
• Probability distributions consistent with a mixed state 1999-09-06
• Continuity bounds for entanglement 1999-08-30
• Conditions for a class of entanglement transformations 1998-11-20
• Complete quantum teleportation using nuclear magnetic resonance (Michael A. Nielsen, Emanuel Knill, and Raymond Laflamme) 1998-11-08
• Quantum information theory (PhD dissertation) 1998-08-15
• On quantum fidelities and channel capacities (Howard Barnum, Emanuel Knill, and Michael A. Nielsen) 1998-08-04
• Quantum entanglement and the communication complexity of the inner product function (Richard Cleve, Wim van Dam, Michael Nielsen, and Alain Tapp) 1997-08-11
• What makes quantum computers powerful? (The Quantum Computation Collective) 1997-07-10
• Information-theoretic approach to quantum error correction and reversible measurement (M. A. Nielsen, Carlton M. Caves, Benjamin Schumacher, and Howard Barnum) 1997-06-30
• Computable functions, quantum measurements, and quantum dynamics 1997-06-03
• Approximate quantum error correction can lead to better codes (D. W. Leung, M. A. Nielsen, I. L. Chuang, and Y. Yamamoto) 1997-04-02
• Reversible quantum operations and their application to teleportation (M. A. Nielsen and Carlton M. Caves) 1997-04-01
• Programmable Quantum Gate Arrays (M. A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang) 1997-03-18
• Information transmission through a noisy quantum channel (Howard Barnum, Michael A. Nielsen, and Benjamin Schumacher) 1997-02-26
• Prescription for experimental determination of the dynamics of a quantum black box (Isaac L. Chuang and Michael A. Nielsen) 1996-10-01
• Quantum data processing and error correction (Benjamin Schumacher and M. A. Nielsen) 1996-10-01
• Properties of quantum trajectories for counting measurements 1996-08-01
• The entanglement fidelity and quantum error correction 1996-06-13
• Chaos in the quantum measurement record 1995-12-09