Eagerly awaited

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to

Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded, the prize has been awarded a total of 118 times. One physicist has received the prize twice: John Bardeen(Bild: AFP )

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded annually since 1901 and has been endowed with eleven million Swedish kronor (approx. 969,000 euros) since 2020. The 2024 prize goes to John J. Hopfield from Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton from the University of Toronto - for research into the foundations of machine learning.

• John Joseph Hopfield (born 1933 in Chicago, USA) is best known for his invention of an associative neural network (Hopfield network) in 1982. He also works on solid-state physics and the physics of neural networks and emergent collective computation.
• Geoffrey E. Hinton (born 1947, Great Britain) is a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist. He investigates the application of artificial neural networks in the areas of learning, memory, perception and symbol processing.

John Joseph Hopfield(Bild: AFP)

Geoffrey Hinton(Bild: AP)

Last year, the award went to the Austro-Hungarian physicist Ferenc Krausz, his colleague Pierre Agostini, who works in the USA, and the physicist Anne L'Huillier, who works in Sweden.

They were honored for experimental methods that generate attosecond light pulses to study the dynamics of electrons in matter.

In 2022, Anton Zeilinger from Upper Austria was awarded this honor.

John Bardeen is the only laureate to have received the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, in 1956 and 1972, and is one of five people to have received the Nobel Prize twice. The prize is awarded every year on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the founder Alfred Nobel.