Nobel Prize Trivia
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57 free Nobel Prize trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Alfred Nobel's will astonished his family by leaving 94 percent of his fortune to reward those who confer 'the greatest benefit on mankind', and the prizes first handed out in 1901 have become the most famous awards on Earth. This quiz is about the prizes and the people who won them: how the six awards are chosen and by whom, why the Peace Prize is given in Oslo, what the medal weighs and what the Latin on it says, and how the economics prize came to be added in 1968. It also covers the laureates: the first winners in each field, the youngest and oldest ever, the two people who won in different disciplines, the only man with two unshared prizes, the family with five, the writers who refused or were forced to refuse, the two posthumous awards, Gandhi's absence, Bob Dylan, Malala and more. Questions run from easy (which prize is awarded in Norway) to expert (which Virgil line is on the medal). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Nobel Prize, its categories, its medal and banquet and individual laureates, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Alfred Nobel, famous scientists and world literature quizzes next.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which invention earned Alfred Nobel the fortune he left to create the Nobel Prizes?
Dynamite
Dynamite: Nobel tamed unstable nitroglycerin into a portable explosive in 1867, and he grew rich selling the patent rights around the world.
Q 02Which field did Alfred Nobel's will leave without a prize?
Mathematics
Mathematics: Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie proposed an Abel Prize to fill the gap, and Norway finally funded one a century later.
Q 03Which institution established the economics prize in memory of Alfred Nobel?
Sveriges Riksbank
Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, created it to mark its own 300th anniversary; the first award went to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen.
Q 04Which South African president shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela?
F. W. de Klerk
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.
Q 05Which organisation won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize?
The European Union
The European Union: the committee credited it with six decades of reconciliation that turned historical enemies into close partners.
Q 06Which body chooses the Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and economics?
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
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.
Q 07Martin Luther King Jr. gave all of his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize money to what?
Civil rights groups
Civil rights groups: he accepted the prize not for himself but on behalf of the thousands of people in the civil rights movement.
Q 08After the Stockholm ceremony, the Nobel banquet is held in which room?
The Blue Hall
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.
Q 09Which scientist shared the 1945 Nobel Prize after mould killed the bacteria on a dish he left out during a holiday?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming: he at first saw penicillin mainly as an antiseptic, and co-laureates Howard Florey and Ernst Chain turned it into a drug.
Q 10To hide two Nobel medals from the Nazis, George de Hevesy dissolved them in what?
Aqua regia
Aqua regia: after the war he recovered the gold from the solution, and the medals of Max von Laue and James Franck were recast.
Q 11The Latin line on the Nobel physics, chemistry, medicine and literature medals is adapted from which Roman poet's epic?
Virgil
Virgil: he reportedly wanted the unfinished Aeneid destroyed, but Augustus made sure the epic survived.
Q 12The Peace Prize medal was designed in 1901 by which Norwegian sculptor?
Gustav Vigeland
Gustav Vigeland: as he was a sculptor, not an engraver, Erik Lindberg, designer of the physics, chemistry, medicine and literature medals, made the dies.
Q 13Which laureate sent his wife to collect his 1983 Peace Prize, fearing he wouldn't be let back into his country?
Lech Wałęsa
Lech Wałęsa: the Gdańsk shipyard electrician had only recently been released from internment under Poland's martial law.
Q 21Who became the youngest science laureate, sharing the 1915 physics prize with his father at 25?
Lawrence Bragg
Lawrence Bragg: the prize came shortly after his younger brother, Robert, was killed at Gallipoli in 1915.
Q 22Which author became the youngest Literature laureate when he won in 1907, aged 41?
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling: the first English-language writer to win it, he still turned down a knighthood and the post of Poet Laureate.
Q 23Who became the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie: she was at first left off the 1903 physics nomination, and was included only after Pierre objected.
Q 14Who received the first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1901?
Wilhelm Röntgen
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!'
Q 15Emil von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Medicine for serum therapy against which disease?
Diphtheria
Diphtheria: Emil von Behring's antitoxin earned him the name 'saviour of children', since the disease was then a major killer of the young.
Q 16Which Dutch chemist won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901?
Jacobus van 't Hoff
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.
Q 17Which author did 42 Swedish writers expect to win the first literature Nobel, which went to Sully Prudhomme?
Leo Tolstoy
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.
Q 18Which Swiss businessman shared the first Nobel Peace Prize, in 1901, with Frédéric Passy?
Henry Dunant
Henry Dunant: financial ruin had left him poor and forgotten for decades before the committee honoured him in old age.
Q 19Who became the youngest Nobel laureate when she shared the 2014 Peace Prize?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai: two years earlier, a Taliban gunman had shot her in the head on a school bus over her campaign for girls' education.
Q 20At 97, John B. Goodenough became the oldest Nobel laureate for helping develop which kind of battery?
Lithium-ion
Lithium-ion: Oxford declined to patent his cathode discovery, so the rights went to a UK research establishment and he received no royalties.
Q 24As of 2025, who is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes?
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling: in 1952 the US State Department refused him a passport over the same political activism that later won him the Peace Prize.
Q 25John Bardeen's first of his two physics Nobels, in 1956, was for inventing what?
The transistor
The transistor: it went on to replace vacuum tubes in radios and computers, and Bardeen won his second physics prize in 1972 for superconductivity.
Q 26Frederick Sanger's second chemistry Nobel, in 1980, was for a method of doing what?
Sequencing DNA
Sequencing DNA: the Wellcome Sanger Institute, named after him, went on to make the largest single contribution to the human genome sequence.
Q 27As of 2025, which organisation is the only laureate to have won three Nobel Prizes?
International Committee of the Red Cross
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.
Q 28Which UN agency won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for fighting hunger and its use as a weapon of war?
The World Food Programme
The World Food Programme: the committee credited it with bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas, not just feeding people.
Q 29Who received the second posthumous Nobel Prize under the old rules, in 1961?
Dag Hammarskjöld
Dag Hammarskjöld: the UN Secretary-General died when his plane crashed in Northern Rhodesia as he flew to negotiate a ceasefire in the Congo.
Q 30Why did Ralph Steinman's 2011 medicine prize stand though he died days before the announcement?
The committee had decided in good faith
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.