John Hopfield facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
John Hopfield
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Hopfield in 2016
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John Joseph Hopfield
July 15, 1933 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
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| Alma mater | Swarthmore College (AB) Cornell University (PhD) |
| Known for | Hopfield network Modern Hopfield network Hopfield dielectric Polariton Kinetic proofreading |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics Molecular biology Complex systems Neuroscience |
| Institutions | Bell Labs Princeton University University of California, Berkeley California Institute of Technology |
| Thesis | A quantum-mechanical theory of the contribution of excitons to the complex dielectric constant of crystals (1958) |
| Doctoral advisor | Albert Overhauser |
| Doctoral students | Steven Girvin Bertrand Halperin David J. C. MacKay José Onuchic Terry Sejnowski Erik Winfree |
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.
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.
Contents
Biography
Early life and education
John Joseph Hopfield was born in 1933 in Chicago to physicists John Joseph Hopfield (born Jan Józef Chmielewski) and Helen (née Staff) Hopfield.
Hopfield received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in physics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1954 and a Doctor of Philosophy in physics from Cornell University in 1958. His doctoral dissertation was titled "A quantum-mechanical theory of the contribution of excitons to the complex dielectric constant of crystals". His doctoral advisor was Albert Overhauser.
Career
He spent two years in the theory group at Bell Laboratories working on the structure of hemoglobin, and subsequently was a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley (physics, 1961–1964), Princeton University (physics, 1964–1980), California Institute of Technology (chemistry and biology, 1980–1997) and again at Princeton (1997–), where he is the Howard A. Prior Professor of Molecular Biology, emeritus. In 1986 he was a co-founder of the Computation and Neural Systems PhD program at Caltech.
Work
In his doctoral work of 1958, he wrote on the interaction of excitons in crystals, coining the term polariton for a quasiparticle that appears in solid-state physics. He wrote: "The polarization field 'particles' analogous to photons will be called 'polaritons'." His polariton model is sometimes known as the Hopfield dielectric.
In 1974 he introduced a mechanism for error correction in biochemical reactions known as kinetic proofreading to explain the accuracy of DNA replication.
Hopfield published his first paper in neuroscience in 1982, titled "Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities" where he introduced what is now known as Hopfield network, a type of artificial network that can serve as a content-addressable memory, made of binary neurons that can be 'on' or 'off'. The original network had a limited memory, this problem was addressed by Hopfield and Dimitry Krotov in 2016. Large memory storage Hopfield networks are now known as modern Hopfield networks.
Together with David W. Tank, Hopfield developed a method in 1985–1986 for solving discrete optimization problems based on the continuous-time dynamics using an analog model. The optimization problem was encoded in the interaction parameters (weights) of the network. The effective temperature of the analog system was gradually decreased, as in global optimization with simulated annealing.
Awards and honors
In 1969 Hopfield and David Gilbert Thomas were awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of condensed matter physics "for their joint work combining theory and experiment which has advanced the understanding of the interaction of light with solids".
He was awarded the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 2001 "for important contributions in an impressively broad spectrum of scientific subjects" including "an entirely different [collective] organizing principle in olfaction" and "a new principle in which neural function can take advantage of the temporal structure of the 'spiking' interneural communication".
Hopfield was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1988. In 1985, Hopfield received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2005 in the field of life sciences. He was the President of the American Physical Society in 2006. Hopfield shared the 2022 Boltzmann Medal award in statistical physics with Deepak Dhar. In 2023, he was named a Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS for lifetime.
He was jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with Geoffrey E. Hinton for "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks".
Doctoral students
His former PhD students include Bertrand Halperin (PhD in 1965), Steven Girvin (1977), Terry Sejnowski (1978), Erik Winfree (1998), José Onuchic (1987) and David J. C. MacKay (1992).
See also
In Spanish: John Hopfield para niños
