John Hopfield

Who is John Hopfield?

John Joseph Hopfield 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.

John Hopfield received his A.B. from Swarthmore College, and a Ph.D in physics from Cornell University in 1958. He spent two years in the theory group at Bell Laboratories, and subsequently was a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, California Institute of Technology and now again at Princeton, where he is the Howard A. Prior Professor of Molecular Biology. 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.

He was awarded the Dirac Medal of the ICTP in 2002 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.