John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on October 8. The scientists are being honored for their foundational contributions to machine learning.
Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, developed a network that stores and recreates patterns.
Hinton, from the University of Toronto, invented a method that autonomously identifies elements in data.
The two professors’ work on artificial neural networks has revolutionized modern AI technology. Hopfield’s associative memory model uses principles from physics to save and restore distorted images. Hinton built on Hopfield’s ideas to create the Boltzmann Machine, which identifies patterns autonomously.
Together, their discoveries have major applications in fields such as image recognition and materials science.
This year’s prize comes with an award of 11 million Swedish kronor ( more than USD 1 million) shared equally between them.
While their research has laid the groundwork for the current explosion in machine learning, the Nobel Committee called their contributions “essential” to many areas of modern physics, and their breakthroughs will continue to shape technologies in other industries well beyond physics.
Hopfield was born in Chicago in 1933 and earned his PhD from Cornell University in 1958. Hinton was born in London in 1947 and earned his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.