John Hopfield

John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American physicist and emeritus professor of Princeton University, most widely known for his study of associative neural networks in 1982. He is known for the development of the Hopfield network. Previous to its invention, research in artificial intelligence (AI) was in a decay period or AI winter, Hopfield work revitalized large scale interest in this field. In 2024 Hopfield, along with Geoffrey Hinton, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational contributions to machine learning, particularly through their work on artificial neural networks. He has been awarded various major physics awards for his work in multidisciplinary fields including condensed matter physics, statistical physics and biophysics.