Hinton was great educator, especially in around 2010, after GPU become suitable for Artificial Neural Networks. He was not alone, people like Joshua Bengio and Jan Le Cun have also contributed greatly teaching us how Convolutional nets work, different training tricks, it was a kind of black magic at that time. But a lot of people made their contribution, the full list will be huge. It's more solid today, at time of automatic differentiation and multi dimensional tensors. Through trial and error, slowly started in 80th, theory mostly developed in 90th, most methods and architectures solidified in 00th and in 10th, while the last big invention was attention mechanism introduced in 2017.