In October 2024, two Nobel Prizes recognised work that sits at the heart of modern artificial intelligence.
Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks". Their ideas helped lay the ground for the deep learning systems that now power image recognition, translation and chatbots.
Chemistry
Half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to David Baker for computational protein design, and the other half to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts the 3D shape of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. This helps scientists understand diseases and design new medicines.
What it tells young learners
- Computing is now part of every science. Biology, chemistry, physics and medicine all use code and data.
- Fundamental research pays off slowly. Some of these ideas were developed decades before they became widely useful.
- Curiosity and mathematics matter. Behind every AI tool are people who studied maths, statistics and science for years.
If a child loves science and enjoys coding, there has never been a better time to combine the two.
