John Hopfield wins Nobel Prize in Physics
Today, some local news. A dear colleague and friend, John Hopfield, today won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the theory of neural networks and artificial intelligence. This is big for us here in the Princeton neuroscience community!
John came up with the concept of an artificial network of neuron-like objects, which could learn by changing connection strength. He and Geoffrey Hinton created the field. To quote my colleague Sebastian Seung, “the theoretical physics approach to neural nets was launched by Hopfield in this classic 1982 paper that introduced the ‘energy function’ to associative memory models.” Sebastian’s whole thread covers many milestones of John’s career, as well as work by his various students and collaborators over the years: David Tank, Sebastian himself, and so many of us here.
In addition to being a foundational figure in neural networks, John has been a great colleague and friend. He guided a critical stage of the growth of our neuroscience community. He guided early recruitments, including me, and not long after, his longtime collaborator David Tank, who eventually became co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Sebastian Seung and Carlos Brody are also major figures in the Hopfield clan here.
My pre-tenure work drew directly on ideas developed in collaboration with him and two students, Dan O’Connor and Gayle Wittenberg. One outcome was this paper, inspired by a comment of his. Dan and Gayle found that when synapses learn, they act like little on-off switches. And Gayle and I worked on spike timing dependent plasticity, a type of learning rule that real synapses use. We did that while John and my now-colleague Carlos Brody were making models of the same phenomenon. In these papers, John wouldn’t take co-credit, which was so humble of him.
Congratulations, John!
My hearty congratulations to your good colleague!
its interesting that the award was given in physics.
Paras,
It is interesting. This has been true of chemistry for a long time–something between a third a half of the chemistry Nobels have been in biological fields. (Many of the others could be called physics.) But it isn’t surprising. The biological sciences are moving far more rapidly than the physical sciences these days. I was a biophysical chemist once upon a time, and have old friends in both the physical and biological worlds. When they update me every few years, I’m always gobsmacked by the biologists’ news, but only see slow progress from the more physical folk.
Congratulations to your entire field.
The world thanks you for this bounty
Hi there–
Unrelated to this post, but I don’t know where to put it otherwise: what caused the drop of almost 20 presidential EC votes that happened today; and what caused the similar big drop a week or so ago ? Does one poll have that kind of power in your system, or did something else change ?
Thank you !