2024 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 8 October 2024.

The citation

The citation reads: "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

John J. Hopfield was born in 1933 in Chicago, the United States, and is affiliated with Princeton University, Princeton. Geoffrey Hinton was born in 1947 in London, United Kingdom, and is affiliated with the University of Toronto, Toronto.

Why it matters

Hopfield and Hinton used tools from physics to develop the foundations of machine learning. Hinton, born in Wimbledon and educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh, has warned about the risks of artificial intelligence.

The prize

The prize is worth 11 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.