2024 – Geoffrey Hinton’s Nobel Prize in Physics

Widely regarded as the “godfather of AI,” Hinton shared the prize with John J. Hopfield of Princeton University for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.

Dr. Hinton was born on 6 December, 1947 in Wimbledon, London, England. Coming from a long and distinguished lineage of notable scholars, Hinton’s father was Howard Hinton, a famed entomologist, and his uncle was economist Colin Clark. Hinton’s middle name, Everest, comes from another well-known relative, George Everest, who was the Surveyor General of India and after whom the mountain is named. Hinton is also the descendent of the mathematician and educator Mary Everest Boole and the logician George Boole, whose work would eventually become one of the foundations of modern computer science. Other notable relations include surgeon and author James Hinton, who was the father of the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton.

Geoffery Hinton attended Clifton College in Bristol, and the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student of King’s College, Cambridge. After exploring several different areas of study, Hinton graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in experimental psychology in 1970. He continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually earned a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978 for research supervised by Christopher Longuet-Higgins. After completing postdoctoral work at Sussex University and the University of California San Diego, he spent five years as a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University. He then became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1987. He spent three years from 1998 until 2001 setting up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London and then returned to the University of Toronto, where he was named a University Professor in 2006 and is now University Professor Emeritus. Since 2017, Hinton has been Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vector Institute in Toronto.