alt Hacker NewsThis might be too weird to be true, but when I heard that Geoff Hinton got the Nobel prize for Physics, I wondered if the prize committee was having trouble finding "real" physicists who had made fundamental advances....
This is not meant to knock Prof Hinton. These are his own words:
“I’m not a physicist, I have very high respect for physics,” Hinton said. “I dropped out of physics after my first year at university because I couldn’t do the complicated math. So, getting an award in physics was very surprising to me. I’m very pleased that the Nobel committee recognised that there’s been huge progress in the area of artificial neural networks.”
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I agree with you. What is also telling is that there is no particularly strong reaction from the physics community that someone obvious was wrongfully omitted.
It is evident that they need more than five categories. Awarding Nobels to individuals who are not particularly (if at all) well-versed in the subject at hand, even if they contributed to a breakthrough in the field, directly or indirectly discredits the prize.
Indeed, the online memes about Hinton and Hassabis being "a bit of a <physicist|chemist> myself!" are justified, in my opinion.