Neuroscience · Curated list
Geoffrey Hinton, Demis Hassabis, John Hopfield and 22 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
Most written-about first. Each description summarises the person's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
1
British-Canadian computer scientist (born 1947)
Geoffrey Everest Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive psychologist and cognitive scientist, and a Nobel laureate, whose work on artificial neural networks earned him the name "the Godfather of AI". He is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
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2
British AI researcher (born 1976)
Sir Demis Hassabis, a British entrepreneur and researcher in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, is Alphabet's chief scientist, and co-founded and runs Isomorphic Labs as chief executive officer.
Wikidata · Photo: John Sears, CC BY-SA 4.0
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3
American scientist (born 1933)
John Joseph Hopfield, an American physicist and emeritus professor at Princeton University, best known for his 1982 study of associative neural networks and for developing the Hopfield network.
Wikidata · Photo: Arthur Petron, CC BY-SA 4.0
Canadian neuropsychologist (1904–1985)
Donald Olding Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, influential in neuropsychology, who tried to understand how the workings of neurons contribute to psychological processes like learning. His best-known idea is the theory of Hebbian learning, set out in his classic 1949 book The Organization of Behavior.
5
American psychologist (1928–1971)
An American psychologist who made his name in artificial intelligence. His pioneering work on artificial neural networks has led some to call him the father of deep learning.
Wikidata · Photo: Anonymous Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
American neurophysiologist and cybernetician (1898–1969)
An American cybernetician and neurophysiologist, known for work laying the foundation of certain theories of the brain and for his part in the cybernetics movement. With Walter Pitts he built computational models on mathematical algorithms known as threshold logic, splitting the inquiry into two separate approaches: one on biological processes in the brain, the other on applying neural networks to artificial intelligence.
7
British neurophysiologist (1910–1977)
A British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and roboticist, born in America.
Wikidata · Photo: unknown in 1943, Public domain
8
American logician and computational neuroscientist (1923–1969)
Walter Harry Pitts Jr., an American logician who worked in computational neuroscience. His landmark theories of how neurons act and of generative processes influenced fields as varied as psychology and the cognitive sciences, philosophy, the neurosciences, computer science, cybernetics, artificial intelligence and artificial neural networks, along with what are now called the generative sciences.
Wikidata · Photo: Creator:Francis Bello (1917-1987), Public domain
British neuroscientist and psychologist
David Courtenay Marr, a British physiologist, neurobiologist and cognitive scientist, who combined findings from neurophysiology, artificial intelligence and psychology into new models of visual processing.
10
American businessperson
An engineer, computer scientist, neuroscientist and businessman from the United States, who co-founded Palm Computing and there co-created the Palm Treo, the PalmPilot and Handspring.
Wikidata · Photo: Jeff Kubina from the milky way galaxy, CC BY-SA 2.0
11
American cognitive scientist (born 1970)
Gary Fred Marcus, an author, cognitive scientist and psychologist from the United States, whose research is known for bringing together artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Wikidata · Photo: Athena Vouloumanos, CC BY 4.0
American computational neuroscientist
A brain theorist and cybernetician whose work has influenced robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, theoretical neuroscience and mathematical systems theory, as well as the evolution of language and the dialogue between neuroscience and architecture. He retired from the University of Southern California in 2016 and holds emeritus rank there, with titles including University Professor and “Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science”, and professorships in psychology, neuroscience, electrical and biomedical engineering, and the biological sciences.
13
Japanese scholar (born 1936)
A Japanese neuroscientist and engineer, known as a pioneer of artificial intelligence and of information geometry.
14
Italian cognitive scientist (born 1947)
Tomaso Armando Poggio, who holds the “Eugene McDermott” professorship in the “Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences”, is an investigator at the “McGovern Institute for Brain Research” and belongs to MIT's “Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory” (CSAIL). He directs MIT's “Center for Biological and Computational Learning” and the “Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines”, a joint effort of several institutions, based at the McGovern Institute since 2013.
Wikidata · Photo: Cirone-Musi, Festival della Scienza, CC BY-SA 2.0
Japanese computer scientist (born 1936)
A Japanese computer scientist, best known for work on deep learning and artificial neural networks. He is now a senior research scientist, working part-time, at the “Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute” in Fukuoka, Japan.
16
American computer scientist (born 1970)
A computational neuroscientist. He earned an MS in image processing in 1994, at the “École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris”, and then a “PhD in computation and neural systems” at Caltech, in 2000.
Wikidata · Photo: Rancarmi at English Wikipedia, Public domain
17
English scientist
A British scientist and entrepreneur, chief scientist of Scientific. In 2012 the Evening Standard listed him among London's most influential scientists, and among the city's most influential people generally.
Wikidata · Photo: Eirik Newth, CC BY 2.0
18
Brazilian scientist (born 1947)
Renato Marcos Endrizzi Sabbatini, now retired as professor at the “University of Campinas School of Medical Sciences” (in its medical genetics department's medical informatics division), and a collaborating professor in the biomedical engineering department of the “Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e Computação”. He studied biomedical sciences for a B.Sc. at the University of São Paulo's medical school, earned a doctorate in behavioural neurophysiology in 1977, and did postdoctoral work in the primate behaviour department of the “Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry”.
Wikidata · Photo: Rsabbatini, CC BY-SA 4.0
19
Chinese scientist
A Chinese neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany. In the ten-year history of CUSPEA (1979–1989), a national physics admission exam held yearly in China in the 1980s, she is the only woman to have come first.
Wikidata · Photo: Zhaopingli, CC BY-SA 4.0
American neuroscientist (born 1947)
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski, who holds the Francis Crick professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. There he leads the “Computational Neurobiology Laboratory” and directs the “Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology”. His research has covered neural networks and computational neuroscience.
21
Israeli computer scientist (1952–2021)
Naftali "Tali" Tishby, a computational neuroscientist and professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Wikidata · Photo: Prof. Naftali Tishbi, CC BY-SA 3.0
22
Indian academic
An academic at the University of Washington in Seattle, who directs the “Center for Neurotechnology” (CNT) and holds a named professorship, the “Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang” chair, spanning two departments: “Computer Science and Engineering” and “Electrical and Computer Engineering”.
American entrepreneur, engineer, and social activist
An engineer, entrepreneur and social activist from the United States, who wrote “InventingThe Future: Stories from a Techno Optimist”.
24
American theoretical neuroscientist
Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming, an American theoretical neuroscientist and expert in artificial intelligence, named among the BBC 100 Women in 2017 and among the Financial Times' "LGBT leaders and allies today".
Wikidata · Photo: SiliconANGLE theCUBE, CC BY 3.0
Indian computer and cognitive scientist
An Indian computer and cognitive scientist, whom many regard as having founded computer science research in India. He headed the team that built TIFRAC, India's first home-grown computer, and was instrumental in setting up CMC Limited in 1975, a Government of India company later bought by Tata Consultancy Services.
Every Wikidata item that is a person whose occupation, on Wikidata, is neuroscientist or a kind of one, and who is also recorded as a computer scientist or as working in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks or deep learning, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 25 are shown.
Wikidata files these under this list's query, but they are not what the list is about:
These belong on the list but Wikidata does not file them where the query looks:
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-26. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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