Professor John Hopfield and Professor Geoff Hinton, who last week were announced as the winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics, helped to shape a career which has left a lasting legacy at Darwin College.

At California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he taught from 1980-1997, Professor Hopfield supervised the PhD of Professor Sir David MacKay, who went on to become Regius Professor of Engineering, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, author of Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air (described by Bill Gates as “one of the best books on energy that has been written”) – and a Darwin Fellow.

“John was very important to David in that he chose to go to Caltech to do his PhD with him,” recalls David’s widow, Dr Ramesh MacKay. “David respected him very much.”

David died of cancer at the tragically early age of 48 in April 2016. He was knighted shortly before his death for services to Scientific Advice in Government and Science Outreach, and is recognised at Darwin in the shape of the Cambridge Zero/Darwin College David MacKay Research Associates, open to researchers working on a topic related to climate change and interested in the intersection of climate and policy.

Professor Geoff Hinton, who led the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL where David worked for several years, was another close friend and influence, and David visited him regularly after he moved to the University of Toronto.

“They all three worked in the field of inference, neural networks and machine learning,and it was a small world,” explains Ramesh. “The strength of feeling between David and John of academic and personal respect was very much present for them both. Likewise with Geoff – I think Geoff had a huge impact on David and his career and they remained close. David considered both John and Geoff amongst his personal heroes.”

Both Nobel Laureates contributed to a symposium held in Cambridge in March 2016, in David’s presence, to celebrate his work. It is available to view here.


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