57 Fun Facts About Nobel Prize

Which invention earned Alfred Nobel the fortune he left to create the Nobel Prizes?

Dynamite: Nobel tamed unstable nitroglycerin into a portable explosive in 1867, and he grew rich selling the patent rights around the world.

Which field did Alfred Nobel's will leave without a prize?

Mathematics: Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie proposed an Abel Prize to fill the gap, and Norway finally funded one a century later.

Which institution established the economics prize in memory of Alfred Nobel?

Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, created it to mark its own 300th anniversary; the first award went to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen.

Which South African president shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela?

F. W. de Klerk: long a firm upholder of white privilege, he decided in 1990 to release Mandela and then negotiated the end of apartheid with him.

Which organisation won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize?

The European Union: the committee credited it with six decades of reconciliation that turned historical enemies into close partners.

Which body chooses the Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and economics?

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: in 1906 it gave the chemistry prize to Henri Moissan, and Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table, lost out by one vote.

Martin Luther King Jr. gave all of his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize money to what?

Civil rights groups: he accepted the prize not for himself but on behalf of the thousands of people in the civil rights movement.

After the Stockholm ceremony, the Nobel banquet is held in which room?

The Blue Hall: architect Ragnar Östberg planned blue walls but kept the bare red brick once he saw it, and the name had already stuck.

Which scientist shared the 1945 Nobel Prize after mould killed the bacteria on a dish he left out during a holiday?

Alexander Fleming: he at first saw penicillin mainly as an antiseptic, and co-laureates Howard Florey and Ernst Chain turned it into a drug.

To hide two Nobel medals from the Nazis, George de Hevesy dissolved them in what?

Aqua regia: after the war he recovered the gold from the solution, and the medals of Max von Laue and James Franck were recast.

The Latin line on the Nobel physics, chemistry, medicine and literature medals is adapted from which Roman poet's epic?

Virgil: he reportedly wanted the unfinished Aeneid destroyed, but Augustus made sure the epic survived.

The Peace Prize medal was designed in 1901 by which Norwegian sculptor?

Gustav Vigeland: as he was a sculptor, not an engraver, Erik Lindberg, designer of the physics, chemistry, medicine and literature medals, made the dies.

Which laureate sent his wife to collect his 1983 Peace Prize, fearing he wouldn't be let back into his country?

Lech Wałęsa: the Gdańsk shipyard electrician had only recently been released from internment under Poland's martial law.

Who received the first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1901?

Wilhelm Röntgen: his first X-ray of a human body part showed his wife's hand, and on seeing it she reportedly exclaimed, 'I have seen my death!'

Emil von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Medicine for serum therapy against which disease?

Diphtheria: Emil von Behring's antitoxin earned him the name 'saviour of children', since the disease was then a major killer of the young.

Which Dutch chemist won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901?

Jacobus van 't Hoff: his idea that carbon's bonds point to the corners of a tetrahedron was mocked at first, then became the basis of stereochemistry.

Which author did 42 Swedish writers expect to win the first literature Nobel, which went to Sully Prudhomme?

Leo Tolstoy: he never won, and one reason given is that the early jury judged works against 'a lofty and sound idealism', which ruled him out.

Which Swiss businessman shared the first Nobel Peace Prize, in 1901, with Frédéric Passy?

Henry Dunant: financial ruin had left him poor and forgotten for decades before the committee honoured him in old age.

Who became the youngest Nobel laureate when she shared the 2014 Peace Prize?

Malala Yousafzai: two years earlier, a Taliban gunman had shot her in the head on a school bus over her campaign for girls' education.

At 97, John B. Goodenough became the oldest Nobel laureate for helping develop which kind of battery?

Lithium-ion: Oxford declined to patent his cathode discovery, so the rights went to a UK research establishment and he received no royalties.

Who became the youngest science laureate, sharing the 1915 physics prize with his father at 25?

Lawrence Bragg: the prize came shortly after his younger brother, Robert, was killed at Gallipoli in 1915.

Which author became the youngest Literature laureate when he won in 1907, aged 41?

Rudyard Kipling: the first English-language writer to win it, he still turned down a knighthood and the post of Poet Laureate.

Who became the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences?

Marie Curie: she was at first left off the 1903 physics nomination, and was included only after Pierre objected.

As of 2025, who is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes?

Linus Pauling: in 1952 the US State Department refused him a passport over the same political activism that later won him the Peace Prize.

John Bardeen's first of his two physics Nobels, in 1956, was for inventing what?

The transistor: it went on to replace vacuum tubes in radios and computers, and Bardeen won his second physics prize in 1972 for superconductivity.

Frederick Sanger's second chemistry Nobel, in 1980, was for a method of doing what?

Sequencing DNA: the Wellcome Sanger Institute, named after him, went on to make the largest single contribution to the human genome sequence.

As of 2025, which organisation is the only laureate to have won three Nobel Prizes?

International Committee of the Red Cross: its first prize, in 1917, honoured its care for wounded soldiers and prisoners of war during World War I.

Which UN agency won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for fighting hunger and its use as a weapon of war?

The World Food Programme: the committee credited it with bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas, not just feeding people.

Who received the second posthumous Nobel Prize under the old rules, in 1961?

Dag Hammarskjöld: the UN Secretary-General died when his plane crashed in Northern Rhodesia as he flew to negotiate a ceasefire in the Congo.

Why did Ralph Steinman's 2011 medicine prize stand though he died days before the announcement?

The committee had decided in good faith: nobody knew he had died, and he had been treating his own pancreatic cancer with his dendritic-cell discovery.

Which writer refused the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, saying a writer must not become 'an institution'?

Jean-Paul Sartre: he refused official honours on principle, having already turned down France's Légion d'honneur in 1945.

Which Soviet writer was forced by his government to decline the 1958 Literature Prize?

Boris Pasternak: he first accepted with delight, then renounced it under threat of exile, and his son finally collected the medal in 1989.

Which Vietnamese negotiator declined to share the 1973 Peace Prize with Henry Kissinger?

Lê Đức Thọ: he said the truce had been violated, and for the first time in the prize's history two committee members resigned in protest.

Hitler barred three German laureates from accepting Nobel Prizes: Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt and which sulfa-drug pioneer?

Gerhard Domagk: the Gestapo arrested him after the award, and he received his medal only in 1947, never the prize money.

The 1948 Peace Prize went unawarded for lack of a 'suitable living candidate', a phrase thought to point to whose death?

Mahatma Gandhi: the committee never chose him, but its chairman later called the Dalai Lama's 1989 award partly a tribute to Gandhi's memory.

Why was no Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 1940, 1941 or 1942?

Germany's occupation of Norway: the committee's institute building escaped a German takeover only by being declared Swedish property.

Albert Einstein's 1921 physics prize famously passed over relativity; which discovery did it cite instead?

The photoelectric effect: Einstein had already promised the prize money to his first wife, Mileva Marić, in their 1919 divorce settlement.

Which Bengali poet became the first Asian Nobel laureate, winning the 1913 Literature Prize?

Rabindranath Tagore: six years later he renounced his British knighthood in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Who was the first Black Nobel laureate, winning the 1950 Peace Prize for Arab–Israeli mediation?

Ralph Bunche: he had to take over the UN's Palestine mediation after its chief negotiator was murdered in 1948, then secured the 1949 armistice.

Which singer-songwriter won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Bob Dylan: he stayed silent about the award at first and skipped the Stockholm ceremony, where Patti Smith performed one of his songs in his place.

Toni Morrison, the 1993 Literature laureate, was the first what?

Black woman to win the prize: Morrison wrote her first novel in early-morning sessions while raising two sons alone and working as an editor.

Which US president won the Nobel Peace Prize amid criticism that he had been in office less than a year?

Barack Obama: the committee cited his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy, including his push for a world without nuclear weapons.

Who was the first woman to win the economics prize, in 2009, for her work on governing the commons?

Elinor Ostrom: her field studies challenged the 'tragedy of the commons', showing that users of shared forests, fisheries and pastures can often manage them well.

Frederick Banting became the youngest medicine laureate, at 32, for co-discovering what?

Insulin: Banting split his half of the prize money with his student Charles Best, whom the committee had left out.

Whose 1994 economics prize was so contentious that the award was then redefined as a social-sciences prize?

John Nash: the row also moved the committee to three-year terms, and the prize began going to political scientists and psychologists.

In Stockholm, laureates receive their diploma directly from whose hands?

The King of Sweden: only the Peace Prize differs, handed over by the Norwegian committee's chair, since Nobel's will gave that prize to Norway.

Where was the Peace Prize ceremony held from 1901 to 1904?

It later moved to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, then the university, and since 1990 to City Hall.

Who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize while under house arrest?

Aung San Suu Kyi: freed in 2010, she returned to politics, but after a military coup in 2021 she was arrested again.

Who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1947?

Gerty Cori: she was long paid a fraction of her husband Carl's salary, and universities pressed him to stop working with her.

Every laureate is required by the Nobel Foundation's statutes to do what?

Give a public lecture: the statutes allow up to six months, so a laureate who misses Nobel Week can still deliver it later.

Which satirical prize, given since 1991, honours achievements that 'first make people laugh, and then make them think'?

The Ig Nobels: Andre Geim won one in 2000 for levitating a frog with magnets, then a real Nobel Prize in 2010 for graphene.

Which former Federal Reserve chair shared the 2022 economics prize for research on banks and financial crises?

Ben Bernanke: his research on bank failures in the Great Depression shaped how he led the Fed through the 2008 financial crisis.

Which physicist helped explain nuclear fission but was left out when Otto Hahn alone won the 1944 chemistry prize?

Lise Meitner: she had fled Nazi Germany in 1938, and in 1997 element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour.

Arafat, Rabin and Peres shared the 1994 Peace Prize a year after which agreement?

The Oslo Accords: a year after the prize, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist who opposed them.

In which Italian town did Alfred Nobel die in 1896?

San Remo: Nobel had moved there from Paris in 1891, after a dispute with the French government over his invention ballistite.

Which iron and steel mill did Nobel buy in 1894 and turn into a major armaments maker?

Bofors: its 40 mm anti-aircraft gun went on to serve both sides in World War II, used by western Allies and Axis powers alike.

Roughly how many people are invited to nominate for the Nobel medicine prize each September?

About 3,000: the names of nominees stay secret for 50 years, so who came close to a recent prize won't be known for decades.