Geoffrey E. Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, where his homepage documents a long career building neural networks. He was also a Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google from 2013 to 2023, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.
In 2024 Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing the prize “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” The Nobel committee highlighted his work on the Boltzmann machine in the 1980s, a learning method grounded in statistical physics that can find patterns in data.
Across his career Hinton helped revive and advance the methods at the heart of deep learning, including backpropagation and deep belief networks. His students and collaborators carried these ideas into the breakthroughs of the 2010s, making him one of the central figures in the modern neural network era.