John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton win Nobel Prize in physics

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries that enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks.

Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, awarded the prize on Tuesday in Stockholm.

Hopfield is from Princeton University in the United States and Hinton is from the University of Toronto in Canada.

The Nobel Prizes were created by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. It comes with a cash award of 11 million Swedish kroner, which is nearly €976,000.

From 1901 to 2023, 117 Nobel Prizes were awarded in Physics. The youngest of the 225 laureates was 25, while the oldest was 96.

Last year’s physics award went to Pierre Agostini from Ohio State University in the United States, Ferenc Krausz from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, and Anne L’Huillier from Lund University in Sweden.

The trio found a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure how the electrons inside atoms and molecules move or change energy.

On Monday, American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of microRNA, tiny RNA molecules that govern how genes are regulated.

The rest of the 2024 prizes, awarded for advancements in chemistry, economics, literature, and toward peace, will be announced throughout the week.

The Nobel laureates will receive their prizes at an awards ceremony in Sweden in December.