Berkeley-related Nobel Prizes: October 8. 2024 update (a long-time-ago Berkeley connection for one of the Physics Nobelists)

Well, the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced at 2:45 AM, Berkeley time today. I happened to be up (wasn't sleeping well because of the lingering hot weather) so I watched. The Prize was awarded to two winners, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks."

Hinton, who is currently on the faculty at the University of Toronto, is most notable for his work on AI and, most recently, his public warnings and concerns about the risks of AI.

Hopfield is currently age 91, and emeritus faculty at Princeton University, so this goes down formally as another Nobel for Princeton (and U.Toronto).

He does have a UC Berkeley connection in his past, though. He was on the faculty in Physics at Berkeley from 1961-63 64, as both an Assistant and an Associate Professor, so was moving up the academic ladder. He would have been in his late '20s, then.

The sequence of his academic life seems to have been: Bachelors from Swarthmore, Ph.D. (Physics) from Cornell, two years at Bell Laboratories, a year or so at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, then (according to Wikipedia) "subsequently a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley", then Princeton, then CalTech, then a return to Princeton.

The Berkeley connection is nice, but if we want to avoid TOO tangentially claiming association with a Nobel (and, from my perspective, that's the best path) he is not really a "Berkeley Nobelist". He wasn't on the Berkeley faculty when he won the award, and he's not a Berkeley alumnus, and he has several other distinguished academic / research appointments in his past.

The Princeton connection in particular is interesting because he writes in an autobiographical essay (linked at his Wikipedia page) that a particular line of research he was pursuing during his first period there came to what seemed like a dead end, and it sounds like he and the Physics department there agreed it would be best if he left Princeton. Thus his time at Caltech, but then eventually a return to Princeton with a faculty appointment in Molecular Biology. Lucky university! They already feature him at the top of their webpage, in less than an hour after the award was announced. Quick work by their public relations staff.

So. in summary, Berkeley contributed to Hopfield's academic career as a faculty member / researcher, but he was only on the faculty here for a few years, early in his long career.

Princeton, by the way, claims as Nobelists:  "Faculty, students and staff listed here performed their award-winning work at Princeton, were employed by or studying at Princeton when they received their award, or are currently working at the University. Alumni recipients are denoted in italics. An asterisk is used to denote graduate alumni." https://www.princeton.edu/meet-princeton/honors-awards

Hopefully we'll hear more about Hopfield's Berkeley connection later. Back to sleep, now.