Professor Geoffrey Hinton FRS awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Royal Society offers its congratulations to Professor Geoffrey E Hinton FRS who has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside Professor John J Hopfield.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Professor Hinton, Emeritus University Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.

Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society said: “I offer my warmest congratulations to Professor Hinton who is distinguished for his work on artificial neural nets.

“He has compared the effects of brain damage with effects of losses in such a net, and found striking similarities with human impairment, such as for recognition of names and losses of categorisation. This may well be the start of autonomous intelligent brain-like machines.”

Professor Hinton, who was born in 1947, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998. He was also awarded the Royal Medal for his pioneering work on algorithms that learned distributed representations in artificial neural networks and their application to speech and vision, leading to a transformation of the international information technology industry.