John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the
Hopfield network
A Hopfield network (or Ising model of a neural network or Ising–Lenz–Little model) is a form of recurrent artificial neural network and a type of spin glass system popularised by John Hopfield in 1982 as described earlier by Little in 1974 b ...
.
Biography
Hopfield was born in 1933 to Polish physicist
John Joseph Hopfield
John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network.
Biography
Hopfield was born in 1933 to Pol ...
and physicist Helen Hopfield. Helen was the older Hopfield's second wife. He is the sixth of Hopfield's children and has three children and six grandchildren of his own.
He received his
A.B.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
in 1958 (supervised by
Albert Overhauser
Albert W. Overhauser (August 17, 1925 – December 10, 2011) was an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his theory of dynamic nuclear polarization known as the Overhauser Effect in nuclear ...
). He spent two years in the theory group at
Bell Laboratories
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
, and subsequently was a faculty member at
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
(physics),
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
(physics),
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...
(Chemistry and Biology) and again at Princeton, where he is the Howard A. Prior Professor of Molecular Biology, Emeritus. For 35 years, he also continued a strong connection with Bell Laboratories.
In 1986 he was a co-founder of the Computation and Neural Systems PhD program at Caltech.
His most influential papers have been "The Contribution of Excitons to the Complex Dielectric Constant of Crystals" (1958), describing the
polariton
In physics, polaritons are quasiparticles resulting from strong coupling of electromagnetic waves with an electric or magnetic dipole-carrying excitation. They are an expression of the common quantum phenomenon known as level repulsion, also ...
; "Electron transfer between biological molecules by thermally activated tunneling" (1974), describing the quantum mechanics of long-range electron transfers; " Kinetic Proofreading: a New Mechanism for Reducing Errors in Biosynthetic Processes Requiring High Specificity" (1974); "Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities" (1982) (known as the Hopfield Network) and, with D. W. Tank, "Neural computation of decisions in optimization problems" (1985). His current research and recent papers are chiefly focused on the ways in which
action potential
An action potential occurs when the membrane potential of a specific cell location rapidly rises and falls. This depolarization then causes adjacent locations to similarly depolarize. Action potentials occur in several types of animal cells, ...
timing and synchrony can be used in neurobiological computation.
Awards and honours
He was awarded the
Dirac Medal
The Dirac Medal is the name of four awards in the field of theoretical physics, computational chemistry, and mathematics, awarded by different organizations, named in honour of Professor Paul Dirac, one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20 ...
of the ICTP in 2001 for his interdisciplinary contributions to understanding biology as a physical process, including the proofreading process in biomolecular synthesis and a description of collective dynamics and computing with attractors in neural networks, and the
Oliver Buckley Prize
The Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize is an annual award given by the American Physical Society "to recognize and encourage outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics." It was endowed by AT&T Bell Lab ...
of the American Physical Society for work on the interactions between light and solids. Hopfield was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
in 1975, and a member of the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
in 1988. In 1985, Hopfield received the Golden Plate Award of the
American Academy of Achievement
The American Academy of Achievement, colloquially known as the Academy of Achievement, is a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in diverse fields and gives them the opportunity to meet ...
. He received the
Albert Einstein World Award of Science
The Albert Einstein World Award for Science is an annual award given by the World Cultural Council "as a means of recognition and encouragement for scientific and technological research and development", with special consideration for researches ...
in 2005. He was the President of the American Physical Society in 2006. Hopfield has been chosen for the prestigious
Boltzmann Medal
The Boltzmann Medal (or Boltzmann Award) is a prize awarded to physicists that obtain new results concerning statistical mechanics; it is named after the celebrated physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. The Boltzmann Medal is awarded once every three years ...
award for the year 2022 . It is bestowed upon a scientist with exceptional contributions in the field of statistical physics, every three year. Hopfield shares the prize with Deepak Dhar.
Terry Sejnowski
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski (born 13 August 1947) is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical ...
David Beratan
David Nathan Beratan (born 1958) is an American chemist and physicist, the R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry at Duke University. He has secondary appointments in the departments of Physics and Biochemistry. He is the Director of the Center ...
José Onuchic José Nelson Onuchic is a Brazilian and American physicist, the Harry C & Olga K Wiess Professor of Physics at Rice University.Homepage at Princeton