Andrej Karpathy is one of the world’s top programmers. While at the University of Toronto, he got a double major in computer science and physics. There was then a minor in math. He attended a class of Geoffrey Hinton and learned about deep learning.1
He wound up getting a PhD, and his thesis was about convolutional and recurrent networks for computer vision. His advisor was Fei-Fei Li at the Stanford Vision Lab. Karpathy worked with other top AI researchers like Daphne Koller, Andrew Ng, ...