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Geoffrey Hinton
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Geoffrey Hinton

“Godfather of AI” and Nobel laureate who made neural networks work

6 December 1947 Canada Verified by our editors
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78 yrs
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Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist known as a “godfather of AI” for his decades of work on neural networks. His 2012 AlexNet result with his students launched the deep-learning revolution. He shared the 2018 Turing Award and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, and left Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI risks.

Biography

Early life

Hinton comes from a family of scientists; his great-great-grandfather was the logician George Boole. He studied experimental psychology at King’s College, Cambridge, and earned a PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1978.

Backpropagation and Boltzmann machines

With David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams he popularised backpropagation in a 1986 Nature paper, showing how multi-layer neural networks can learn internal representations. With Terry Sejnowski he invented the Boltzmann machine. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1987.

The deep-learning breakthrough

In 2012 his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever built AlexNet, which won the ImageNet competition by a wide margin and convinced the tech industry that deep learning worked. Their company DNNresearch was bought by Google in 2013, and Hinton worked part-time at Google Brain for a decade.

Nobel Prize and warnings

Hinton shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield for foundational discoveries enabling machine learning. He resigned from Google in May 2023 to warn openly about the dangers of AI.

Timeline

  1. 1947

    Born in Wimbledon, London, England

  2. 1978

    PhD from Edinburgh

  3. 1986

    Backpropagation paper in Nature

  4. 1987

    Joins the University of Toronto

  5. 2012

    AlexNet wins ImageNet

  6. 2013

    Joins Google

  7. 2018

    Turing Award

  8. 2023

    Leaves Google

  9. 2024

    Nobel Prize in Physics

Notable works

  • 1986

    Learning representations by back-propagating errors Paper

    With Rumelhart and Williams.

  • 2012

    ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Paper

    With Krizhevsky and Sutskever.

Awards and honours

  • Fellow of the Royal Society

    1998

  • Turing Award

    2018

  • Companion of the Order of Canada

    2018

  • Nobel Prize in Physics

    2024

Did you know?

  1. 1

    Because of a back problem, he has avoided sitting down for many years.

  2. 2

    He is a great-great-grandson of George Boole, inventor of Boolean logic.

  3. 3

    His former students include OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

Connections

Related people

Also born on 6 December

Frequently asked

Who is Geoffrey Hinton?

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist known as a “godfather of AI” for his decades of work on neural networks. His 2012 AlexNet result with his students launched the deep-learning revolution. He shared the 2018 Turing Award and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, and left Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI risks.

How old is Geoffrey Hinton?

Geoffrey Hinton is 78 years old, born on 6 December 1947 in Wimbledon, London, England.

Where is Geoffrey Hinton from?

Geoffrey Hinton was born in Wimbledon, London, England.

What is Geoffrey Hinton known for?

Geoffrey Hinton is best known for Backpropagation; deep learning; AlexNet; Nobel Prize in Physics 2024; Turing Award 2018.

What awards has Geoffrey Hinton received?

Notable honours include Fellow of the Royal Society (1998), Turing Award (2018), Companion of the Order of Canada (2018), Nobel Prize in Physics (2024).

References

  1. Geoffrey Hinton — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  2. Geoffrey Hinton — Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  3. Geoffrey Hinton — IMDb. IMDb. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  4. Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize facts. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  5. Geoffrey Hinton — Goodreads author page. Goodreads. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  6. Geoffrey Hinton — Hindi Wikipedia. Wikipedia (Hindi). Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  7. Official website. www.cs.toronto.edu. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  8. Geoffrey Hinton (Q92894) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.

Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Geoffrey Hinton”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more

External links

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“Geoffrey Hinton.” TrackFame, last updated 5 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/geoffrey-hinton

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