--- title: Who Invented Backpropagation? | daily.dev description: Backpropagation's modern version (reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Finnish master student Seppo Linnainmaa, marking... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/who-invented-backpropagation--eiuzylcrq twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Who Invented Backpropagation? | daily.dev og:description: Backpropagation's modern version (reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Finnish master student Seppo Linnainmaa, marking... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/who-invented-backpropagation--eiuzylcrq og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/eiUzyLCRQ.png og:image:alt: Who Invented Backpropagation? og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Who Invented Backpropagation? **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 16 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Backpropagation's modern version (reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Finnish master student Seppo Linnainmaa, marking its 50th anniversary in 2020. While gradient descent concepts existed since the 1960s with work by Kelley, Bryson, and others, Linnainmaa's method provided the efficient implementation used in all modern neural network software like TensorFlow. The method was later applied to neural networks by Werbos in 1982, and gained widespread acceptance after Rumelhart et al.'s experimental analysis in 1985. Despite claims that deep networks required unsupervised pre-training, research in 2010 demonstrated that plain backpropagation could successfully train deep networks without such preprocessing. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: --- Tags: [#deep-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/deep-learning), [#neural-networks](https://daily.dev/tags/neural-networks), [#gradient-descent](https://daily.dev/tags/gradient-descent) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/who-invented-backpropagation--eiuzylcrq) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Who Invented Backpropagation?","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/who-invented-backpropagation--eiuzylcrq","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/who-invented-backpropagation--eiuzylcrq"},"datePublished":"2025-08-18T18:00:13.704Z","dateModified":"2025-08-18T18:00:41.455Z","description":"Backpropagation's modern version (reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Finnish master student Seppo Linnainmaa, marking...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/5136f2dcab98793375ab1acecc99ae49?_a=AQAEulh","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/5136f2dcab98793375ab1acecc99ae49?_a=AQAEulh","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/who-invented-backpropagation--eiuzylcrq","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"deep-learning,neural-networks,gradient-descent","timeRequired":"PT16M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Who Invented Backpropagation?"}]} ```