Geoffrey Hinton

British-Canadian computer scientist and psychologist · United Kingdom · Academics · Born 1947 · age 78

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Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.

A life in dates

2025Queen Elizabeth Prize for EngineeringAward2023ACM FellowAward2022Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific ResearchAward2019Honda PrizeAward2018Turing AwardAward2016IEEE Maxwell AwardAward2014IEEE Frank Rosenblatt AwardAward2013Honorary Doctor of the University of SherbrookeAward2010Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and EngineeringAward2003Fellow of the Cognitive Science SocietyAward2001Rumelhart PrizeAward2000“I got Christianity at school and Stalinism at home.”In their wordsOn his childhood.Read the whole statement

“Then we got very excited because now there was this very simple local-learning rule. On paper it looked just great.”In their wordsOn the Boltzmann machine training algorithm.Read the whole statement

“The reason hidden units in neural nets are called hidden units is that Peter Brown told me about hidden Markov models.”In their wordsOn the naming of the phrase "hidden neurons".Read the whole statement

“I'm much more interested in how the brain does it. I'm only interested in applications just to prove that this is interesting stuff to keep the funding flowing.”In their wordsOn practical applications.Read the whole statement

“... as soon as I got backpropagation working, I realized--because of what we'd been doing with Boltzmann machines--that you could use autoencoders to do unsupervised learning.”In their wordsOn autoencoders.Read the whole statement

1998Fellow of the Royal SocietyAwardIEEE Neural Networks Pioneer AwardAward1990AAAI FellowAward1979“We got quite a few applications, and one of these applications I couldn't decide if the guy was a total flake or not...”In their wordsOn the 1979 conference, the proceedings of which were published in Hinton, G. & Anderson, J. (eds) Parallel Models of Associative MemoryRead the whole statement

1947Born6 December 1947

Also in Deutsch

Photos 3

In 2016, from left to right,Russ Salakhutdinov, Richard S. Sutton, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Steve Jurvetson

Hinton at NeurIPS 2025

In their own words 10

Geoffrey Hinton

10 statements, newest first

I got Christianity at school and Stalinism at home.
2000, On his childhood., Own words
Then we got very excited because now there was this very simple local-learning rule. On paper it looked just great.
2000, On the Boltzmann machine training algorithm., Own words
I first of all explained to him why it wouldn't work, based on an argument in Rosenblatt's book, which showed that essentially it was an algorithm that couldn't break symmetry...
2000, On David Rumelhart's rediscovery of backpropagation., Own words

Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0

Awards

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering2025

Nobel Prize in Physics2024

ACM Fellow2023

Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research2022

Dickson Prize in Science2021

Honda Prize2019

Companion of the Order of Canada2018

Turing Award2018

BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award2016

IEEE Maxwell Award2016

IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award2014

Honorary Doctor of the University of Sherbrooke2013

Honorary Doctor of the University of Sussex2011

Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering2010

IJCAI Award for Research Excellence2005

Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society2003

Rumelhart Prize2001

Honorary Doctor of the University of Edinburgh2001

Fellow of the Royal Society1998

IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award1998

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada1996

AAAI Fellow1990

In their orbit

Father: Howard Everest Hinton

About this person

Geoffrey Hinton was born 6 December 1947 and spent decades working on artificial neural networks when almost no one thought they'd amount to much. In 1986 he co-authored the backpropagation paper with David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams that gave the field a training method it could use. By 2012 his student collaboration AlexNet broke open computer vision at the ImageNet challenge and deep learning went from fringe bet to center stage. He split his time between the University of Toronto and Google Brain from 2013 to 2023, co-founded the Vector Institute in 2017, and collected the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, then the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield. In May 2023 he resigned from Google to speak plainly about what he now sees: malicious misuse, mass unemployment, and the chance that artificial general intelligence could outrun the people who made it.

Country

United Kingdom

In common with Geoffrey

Jennifer LopezAlso in Atlas (2024)

Mark StrongAlso in Atlas (2024)

Lana ParrillaAlso in Atlas (2024)

Simu LiuAlso in Atlas (2024)

Ilya PrigogineBoth received Honda Prize

Herbert A. SimonBoth received IJCAI Award for Research Excellence

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