AI Godfather Hinton wins Nobel Prize: The story of the Hinton family and China

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their fundamental discoveries and inventions in artificial neural network machine learning. Mr. Hinton should be the first scientist in history to win both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize.

Here is an introduction to his life and his family's story in China:

In today's artificial intelligence field, there are many stars and heroes. But if we talk about the world-recognized industry giants and "godfathers", then it is undoubtedly Mr. Geoffrey Hinton, who is 75 years old this year.

Hinton is a British-born Canadian computer scientist and psychologist, a professor at the University of Toronto, and received a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. He is one of the inventors of the backpropagation algorithm and the contrastive divergence algorithm, and an active promoter of deep learning. He is known as the "father of deep learning" and won the Turing Award in 2018.

What I want to talk about today is the relationship between his family and China, which can even be associated with the recent popular movie "Oppenheimer".

Mr. Hinton

Hinton's great-great-grandfather is George Boole, who proposed the Boolean function. Boole abstracted logical problems into algebraic forms, so that logical reasoning can be carried out in the framework of pure mathematics. It was on the basis of Boolean algebra that Shannon proposed the principle of switching circuit analysis in 1938, laying the foundation for the manufacture of modern computers with electronic components.

Boole's youngest daughter is named Ethel Lilian Voynich, the author of The Gadfly. Readers born in the 1970s and 1980s may have some impression of this novel.

Hinton's father, Howard Everest Hinton, is an entomologist and a member of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. Here comes the exciting part: Hinton's aunt, Joan Hinton, is the first foreigner to obtain Chinese citizenship. Her Chinese name is "Han Chun", and she is known as "an old friend of the Chinese people and a famous Marxist".

Han Chun herself is a nuclear physicist and a classmate of Yang Zhenning. Her teacher is Nobel Prize winner and famous American physicist Enrico Fermi. Soon after entering university, the critical period of World War II came. In 1942, in order to reverse the situation of World War II, the United States began to study nuclear weapons, which is the famous Manhattan Project. In February 1944, she was personally recruited by Fermi to participate in the Manhattan Project. At the age of 23, she was still a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin. At a young age, she became one of the scientists participating in the project and served as Fermi's assistant. Fermi also appeared in the movie "Oppenheimer".

A total of 640 women participated in the Manhattan Project, including famous scientists such as Wu Jianxiong and Maria Mayer

Physicist Enrico Fermi

However, after the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the huge damage caused by the atomic bombs made Han Chun resolutely leave the Manhattan Project and follow her husband Yang Zao (Erwin Engst) to Yan'an with the ideal of "liberating all mankind."

Han Chun and Yang Zao in Yan'an

The couple's idea is to improve the breed of dairy cows and increase milk production so that everyone in China can afford milk. In 2003, the bedroom direct cooling milk tank designed by Han Chun reached the international advanced level. The dairy cows they improved made the milk production of less than 7,000 kilograms reach more than 9,000 kilograms per month, and even more than 13,000 kilograms. The research of Han Chun and his wife promoted the mechanization of dairy cow breeding in China and made great contributions to the development of my country's milk industry.

On December 25, 2003, Yang Zao died in Peking Union Medical College Hospital. In August 2004, Han Chun became the first foreigner to obtain a Chinese "green card". Han Chun died in Beijing in 2010.

Let’s go back to Hinton. Some well-known figures in the field of AI today are basically related to him. For example, Yann LeCun, the chief scientist of Meta (translated as Yang Likun in Chinese), is Hinton’s postdoctoral fellow. Ilya Sutskever, one of the founders of OpenAI and the technical core, is also his student. Alex Krizhevsky, who went from OpenAI to Tesla and then returned to OpenAI, is also his student.

The picture below shows Hinton’s amazing family, circle of friends and students:

Hinton himself has a bad back and cannot sit, so he can only stand or lie down. So during meetings, he basically spoke while lying on the ground. Often, when everyone was talking, a very important sentence would pop up on the ground. For more stories about Hinton, you can visit his personal homepage at the University of Toronto:

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/