John Hopfield

Last updated

John Joseph Hopfield
Born (1933-07-15) July 15, 1933 (age 90)
Nationality American
Alma mater Swarthmore College
Cornell University
Known for Hopfield network
Polariton
Kinetic proofreading
Awards Dirac Medal of the ICTP (2001)
Harold Pender Award (2002)
Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society
Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2005)
Benjamin Franklin Medal (2019)
Boltzmann Medal (2022)
Scientific career
Fields Physics, Molecular biology, 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 David Beratan
Steven Girvin
Bertrand Halperin
David J. C. MacKay
Gerald Mahan
José Onuchic
Terry Sejnowski
Erik Winfree
Li Zhaoping

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.

Contents

Biography

Hopfield was born in 1933 to Polish physicist John Joseph Hopfield 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. from Swarthmore College in 1954, and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1958 (supervised by Albert Overhauser). He spent two years in the theory group at Bell Laboratories, and subsequently was a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley (physics), Princeton University (physics), California Institute of Technology (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; "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 timing and synchrony can be used in neurobiological computation.

Awards and honours

He was awarded the Dirac Medal 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 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 in 1975, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1988. [1] [2] [3] In 1985, Hopfield received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. [4] He received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2005. [5] He was the President of the American Physical Society in 2006. [6] Hopfield has been chosen for the prestigious Boltzmann Medal 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.

Students

His former PhD students include Sir David MacKay, Terry Sejnowski, Bertrand Halperin, Steven Girvin, Erik Winfree, David Beratan, Li Zhaoping, and José Onuchic. [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kip Thorne</span> American physicist (born 1940)

Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.</span> American astrophysicist

Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate in Physics for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juan Maldacena</span> Argentine physicist (born 1968)

Juan Martín Maldacena is an Argentine theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has made significant contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity. His most famous discovery is the AdS/CFT correspondence, a realization of the holographic principle in string theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carver Mead</span> American scientist and engineer

Carver Andress Mead is an American scientist and engineer. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years. He taught Deborah Chung, the first female engineering graduate of Caltech. He advised the first female electrical engineering student at Caltech, Louise Kirkbride. His contributions as a teacher include the classic textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980), which he coauthored with Lynn Conway.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nathan Rosen</span> Israeli physicist (1909–1995)

Nathan Rosen was an American-Israeli physicist noted for his study on the structure of the hydrogen atom and his work with Albert Einstein and Boris Podolsky on entangled wave functions and the EPR paradox. The Einstein–Rosen bridge, later named the wormhole, was a theory of Nathan Rosen.

Terrence Joseph Sejnowski 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 and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bertrand Halperin</span>

Bertrand I. Halperin is an American physicist, former holder of the Hollis Chair of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Taylor Compton</span> American physicist and university president (1887–1954)

Karl Taylor Compton was a prominent American physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1930 to 1948.

Network dynamics is a research field for the study of networks whose status changes in time. The dynamics may refer to the structure of connections of the units of a network, to the collective internal state of the network, or both. The networked systems could be from the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, sociology, economics, computer science, etc. Networked systems are typically characterized as complex systems consisting of many units coupled by specific, potentially changing, interaction topologies.

John Myrick Dawson was an American computational physicist and the father of plasma-based acceleration techniques. Dawson earned his degrees in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park: a B.S. in 1952 and Ph.D. in 1957. His thesis "Distortion of Atoms and Molecules in Dense Media" was prepared under the guidance of Zaka Slawsky.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Bialek</span> American biophysicist

William Samuel Bialek is a theoretical biophysicist and a professor at Princeton University and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Much of his work, which has ranged over a wide variety of theoretical problems at the interface of physics and biology, centers around whether various functions of living beings are optimal, and whether a precise quantification of their performance approaches limits set by basic physical principles. Best known among these is an influential series of studies applying the principles of information theory to the analysis of the neural encoding of information in the nervous system, showing that aspects of brain function can be described as essentially optimal strategies for adapting to the complex dynamics of the world, making the most of the available signals in the face of fundamental physical constraints and limitations.

The Computation and Neural Systems (CNS) program was established at the California Institute of Technology in 1986 with the goal of training Ph.D. students interested in exploring the relationship between the structure of neuron-like circuits/networks and the computations performed in such systems, whether natural or synthetic. The program was designed to foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration among engineers, neuroscientists, and theoreticians.

Stanislas Leibler is a French–American theoretical and experimental biologist and physicist. He is Systems Biology Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Gladys T. Perkin Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Living Matter at the Rockefeller University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ned Wingreen</span> American theoretical physicist

Ned S. Wingreen is a theoretical physicist and the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences at Princeton University. He is a member of the Department of Molecular Biology and of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, where he is currently director of graduate studies. He is the associate director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, and is also associated faculty in the department of physics. Working with Yigal Meir, Wingreen formulated the Meir-Wingreen Formula which describes the electric current through an arbitrary mesoscopic system.

David Nathan Beratan 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 for Synthesizing Quantum Coherence, a NSF Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation.

The Princeton University Department of Physics is an academic department dedicated to research and teaching at Princeton University. The associated faculty members, researchers, and students have been recognized for their research contributions, having been awarded 19 Nobel Prizes, four National Medals of Science, and two Wolf Prizes in Physics. Notable professors, researchers, and graduate students affiliated with the department include Richard Phillips Feynman, Joseph H. Taylor, Jim Peebles, Eugene P. Wigner, and John von Neumann. In addition, the department offers degree programs for bachelor's students (A.B.) and doctoral students (Ph.D.).

Sara A. Solla is an Argentine-American physicist and neuroscientist whose research applies ideas from statistical mechanics to problems involving neural networks, machine learning, and neuroscience. She is a professor of physics and of physiology at Northwestern University.

References

  1. "John J. Hopfield". www.nasonline.org.
  2. "John Joseph Hopfield". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. October 12, 2023.
  3. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org.
  4. "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  5. "Albert Einstein World Award of Science 2005". Archived from the original on October 23, 2013. Retrieved August 13, 2013.
  6. "John Hopfield, Array of Contemporary Physicists". Archived from the original on October 19, 2013. Retrieved October 19, 2013.
  7. John Joseph Hopfield at the Mathematics Genealogy Project