Pioneers

Classical mathematics

Developed least squares and the normal distribution that underpins regression.

Modern statistics

Formalized maximum likelihood and the design of experiments.

Game theory and computing

Proved the minimax theorem and co-founded game theory.

Foundations of probability

Put probability theory on a rigorous axiomatic foundation.

Foundations of computation

Defined computation formally and framed the question of machine intelligence.

Information theory

Founded information theory and defined entropy as a measure of uncertainty.

Founding of AI

Named the field of artificial intelligence and created the Lisp language.

Founding of AI

Co-founded the MIT AI Laboratory and analysed the limits of single-layer networks.

Early neural networks

Built the perceptron, the first trainable artificial neuron.

Statistical learning

Created bagging and random forests, and formalized decision trees.

Game theory

Proved that every finite game has an equilibrium, generalizing game theory beyond zero-sum.

Foundations of probability

Gave the rule for revising a probability in the light of evidence.

Statistical learning theory

Co-developed the support vector machine and statistical learning theory.

Probabilistic reasoning

Made probabilistic reasoning tractable through Bayesian networks, then formalized causality.

Deep learning

Co-authored the paper that made backpropagation widely known, and led the deep learning revival.

Deep learning

Developed convolutional networks and demonstrated them at scale on real recognition tasks.

Deep learning

Advanced neural approaches to language, including distributed word representations.