Geoffrey Hinton / University of Toronto — AI Researcher

**Geoffrey Everest Hinton** is Professor Emeritus at the **University of Toronto**, recipient of the **2024 Nobel Prize in Physics (announced October 2024)** (shared with John Hopfield), and universally recognized as the **"Godfather of Deep Learning."** Born in London in 1947, Hinton spent decades as an academic outsider championing neural networks when the rest of AI research had abandoned them for symbolic methods. His persistence was vindicated spectacularly — backpropagation, Boltzmann machines, dropout, and deep belief networks all trace directly to his work and his students' work.