Doctoral Alum Wins Nobel Prize in Physics

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Princeton prof John Hopfield, PhD ’58, was honored for foundational work in training artificial neural networks

By Beth Saulnier

To the long list of Cornellians who have won the Nobel, add one more: John Hopfield, PhD ’58, has received the 2024 prize in physics. Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton, shares the award with a colleague at the University of Toronto. The two were honored for their work in training artificial neural networks.

As the Nobel organization said in the announcement, they “have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning.”

John Hopfield, PhD ’58
Denise Applewhite / Princeton University
Hopfield at Princeton in 1999.

Hopfield in particular was cited for inventing an eponymous network, based on principles of physics, “that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.”

He and his co-laureate—Geoffrey Hinton, who used Hopfield’s network as the basis for a different one, known as the Boltzmann machine—will share the cash award of 11 million Swedish kroner (about $1 million).

As Princeton reported, Hopfield learned of the award upon returning to a thatched cottage where he’s staying in England: “My wife and I went out to get a flu shot and stopped to get a coffee on the way back home,” he said, noting that they came back to find an “astounding” and “heartwarming” collection of emailed congratulations.

Hopfield learned of the award upon returning to a thatched cottage where he’s staying in England.

An undergraduate alum of Swarthmore, Hopfield studied on the Hill under theoretical physicist Albert Overhauser, who’d go on to win the National Medal of Science.

“He was enormously supportive as a listener and critic when I went to see him, but finding direction and resolving technical theoretical issues were entirely my problem,” Hopfield recalled in a 2018 essay reflecting on his life and career. “The great gift he gave me was ownership of an interesting question, and total responsibility for research and progress.”

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A Legacy of Laureates

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Hopfield’s long career has included work at Bell Labs and Caltech, as well as a total of more than a quarter-century on the faculty at Princeton.

Among his many awards and honors are a MacArthur “genius” grant, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, and the World Cultural Council’s Albert Einstein World Award of Science.

Among Hopfield's many awards and honors are a MacArthur “genius” grant.

“To me—growing up with a father and mother both of whom were physicists—physics was not subject matter. The atom, the troposphere, the nucleus, a piece of glass, the washing machine, my bicycle, the phonograph, a magnet—these were all incidentally the subject matter,” Hopfield observed in the 2018 essay.

“The central idea was that the world is understandable, that you should be able to take anything apart, understand the relationships between its constituents, do experiments, and on that basis be able to develop a quantitative understanding of its behavior. Physics was a point of view that the world around us is, with effort, ingenuity, and adequate resources, understandable in a predictive and reasonably quantitative fashion. Being a physicist is a dedication to a quest for this kind of understanding.”

(Illustration by Caitlin Cook / Cornell University.)

Published October 8, 2024

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