We continue to celebrate Prof Geoffrey Hinton’s being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his revolutionary work enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks. To mark this tremendous achievement, the Department of Physics invited Prof. Hinton to deliver the 2025 Martin Family Lecture in Physics. (As a reminder, through the generosity of the Martin Family’s endowment, the Martin Family Lectures are offered every four years in the Department of Physics, and rotate through three other Departments in other years.)

On February 25, Prof. Hinton delivered a compelling lecture on the role of his thought and discoveries in the early stages of the development of modern AI. The lecture and subsequent reception took place at the Schwartz-Reisman Innovation Campus. In the talk, Boltzmann Machines: Statistical Physics meets Neural Networks, Hinton discussed his invention of the Boltzmann machine, an early example of an unsupervised deep learning model, one which arose from ideas in statistical physics. His work has helped lead to advancements in a wide range of areas, such as speech recognition and object classification, that greatly impact our lives today. The lecture was followed by an exciting fireside chat with Prof. Hinton and Prof. Yonatan Kahn, who is newly appointed to the Department of Physics (see later in this issue), on what the future will bring in exploring the connections between Physics, machine learning and AI.

As a token of the warm recognition and esteem in which Prof. Hinton is held in the Department of Physics, we appointed Prof. Hinton honorary Graduate Faculty Membership (Emeritus) in Physics; we made sure this this appointment conferred zero administrative duties!

More on this annual lecture: 2025 Martin Lecture in Physics | Faculty of Arts & Science