Professor John Hopfield

After receiving a BA from Swarthmore College (1954) Hopfield studied theoretical condensed matter physics at Cornell University (PhD 1958). He next became a member of the technical staff at ATT Bell Laboratories, an affiliation he kept up for almost 30 years while on the faculty at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and Caltech. He received the 1968 Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (jointly with experimental chemist D. G. Thomas).

Hopfield was appointed as Roscoe Dickinson Professor of Chemistry and Biology at Caltech in 1980 and by this time, the first paper he wrote in this field “Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities” (1982) is the most often cited of his more than 200 scientific papers.

Recognitions include honorary degrees from Chicago and Swarthmore, MacArthur Fellow (1983-1988), California Scientist of the Year (1991), The Dirac Medal and Prize (2001), Albert Einstein Award (2005). Swartz Prize, Society for Neuroscience (2012). He was President of the American Physical Society (2006), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2019 John Hopfield was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Physics by the Franklin Institute for his work in applying theoretical physics to biological questions, including neuroscience and genetics. His work on neural networks has had a significant impact on machine learning.

In 2024 he was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in Physics for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks".