Interesting facts about Nobel laureates. Nobel Prize for prisoners and minors: what you didn’t know about the main peace prize
The second week of October has been called Nobel for 111 years: it is at this time that the Nobel Foundation, in accordance with the terms of the will of the famous Swedish scientist, announces the names of the winners of the most prestigious scientific prize in the world. In 2012, laureates in the field of physiology and medicine and physics have already been named, and the last laureates in the field of economics will be named on October 15. It is not so easy to answer the question “How many Nobel Prize laureates are there?” In total, from 1901 to 2011, the prize was received by 851 laureates, but in the list of people and organizations awarded by name there are only 844 names and titles - simply because some were laureates twice or even three times.
The largest number of laureates—199 people (including 2012)—received awards for research in the field of physiology and medicine. There are only six fewer physicists - 193 (including 2012), of which one - twice. 160 laureates received the prize in chemistry (including one twice), 121 received the peace prize (including one twice and one three times), 108 in literature, and a total of 69 in economics (introduced in 1969) .
Repeated winners
Among the rules for awarding Nobel Prizes is the condition that all prizes, except the Peace Prize, can be awarded to one person only once. Nevertheless, four Nobel laureates are known who received the prize twice: Marie Sklodowska-Curie (pictured; in physics - in 1903, in chemistry - in 1911), Linus Pauling (in chemistry - in 1954, peace prize - in 1962), John Bardeen (in physics - in 1956 and 1972) and Frederick Sanger (in chemistry - in 1958 and 1980). In the history of the Nobel Prize, there has only been one three-time winner - the International Committee of the Red Cross, which received the Peace Prize (this prize is the only one that allows nomination of not only individuals, but also organizations) in 1917, 1944 and 1963.
Laureates posthumously
In 1974, the Nobel Foundation introduced a rule that the Nobel Prize should not be awarded posthumously. Before this, there were only two cases of posthumous award of the prize: in 1931 - to Erik Karlfeldt (for literature), and in 1961 - to Dag Hammarskjöld (peace prize). After the rule was introduced, it was violated only once, and then due to a tragic coincidence. In 2011, the Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Ralph Steinman (pictured), but he died of cancer a few hours before the decision of the Nobel Committee was announced.
Nobel economy
This year, the monetary portion of the Nobel Prize is $1.1 million. The amount was reduced by 20% in June 2012 in order to save money. As the Nobel Foundation argued for this step, the innovation will help avoid a reduction in the organization’s capital in the long term, because capital management should be carried out in such a way that “the prize can be awarded indefinitely.”
Nobel cache
In the entire history of the Nobel Prize, there has only been one recorded case where laureates received the same Nobel medals twice for the same discovery. German physicists Max von Laue (1915 laureate) and James Frank (1925 laureate), after the ban on receiving Nobel Prizes introduced in 1936 in Nazi Germany, handed over their medals for preservation to Niels Bohr, who headed the institute in Copenhagen. In 1940, when the Reich occupied Denmark, an employee of the institute, Hungarian Gyorgy de Hevesy (pictured), fearing that the medals might be confiscated, dissolved them in “regia vodka” (a mixture of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids), and after liberation isolated the gold from the preserved solution of chloroauric acid and donated it to the Royal Swedish Academy. There, Nobel medals were again made from it, which were returned to the laureates. By the way, Gyorgy de Hevesy himself was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944.
Nobel centenarian
Italian neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini (pictured) is the longest-living Nobel laureate and the oldest of them: she turned 103 this year. She was awarded the Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1986, when she celebrated her 77th birthday. The oldest laureate at the time of the award was 90-year-old American Leonid Gurvich (Prize in Economics - 2007), and the youngest was 25-year-old Australian William Lawrence Bragg (Prize in Physics - 1915), who became a laureate along with his father William Henry Bragg.
Women of Nobel
The largest number of women laureates are among the Nobel Peace Prize (15 people) and the Literature Prize (11 people). However, the winners of the literary prize can boast that the first of them was awarded the high title 37 years earlier: in 1909, the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf (pictured) became the Nobel laureate in literature, and the first female peace prize laureate was the American Emily Green Balch in 1946.
Nobel co-authors
According to the rules of the Nobel Foundation, no more than three people can receive a prize in one field for different works in a year - or no more than three authors of one work. The first three were Americans George Whipple, George Minot and William Murphy (pictured), awarded the Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934. And the last (as of 2011) are Americans Saul Pellmutter and Adam Reiss and Australian Brian Schmidt (physics), as well as Liberians Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee and Yemeni citizen Tawakul Karman (Nobel Peace Prize). If the prize is awarded to more than one person or for more than one work, it is divided proportionally: first by the number of works, then by the number of authors of each work. If two works are awarded the prize, one of which has two authors, then the author of the first will receive half the amount, and each of the authors of the second will receive only a quarter.
Nobel passes
The rules for awarding the Nobel Prize do not necessarily require it to be awarded every year: according to the decision of the Nobel Committee, if there is no worthy work among those vying for a high award, the prize may not be awarded. In this case, its monetary equivalent is transferred to the Nobel Foundation in whole or in part - in the latter case, from a third to two thirds of the amount can be transferred to the special fund of the profile section. During three war years - in 1940, 1941 and 1942 - Nobel Prizes were awarded at all. Taking into account this omission, the Nobel Peace Prize was most often not awarded (18 times), the Prize in Physiology and Medicine - nine times, in Chemistry - eight times, in Literature - seven times, in Physics - six times, and in the award of the Prize in Economics, introduced only in 1969, there was not a single pass.
Nobel transformation
The famous physicist Ernest Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. The phrase with which he responded to this news became popular: the scientist said that “All science is either physics or stamp collecting,” and a little later he commented on his award even more figuratively, saying that of all the transformations that he witnessed, “The most unexpected thing was my own transformation from a physicist to a chemist.”
Nobel heirs
The first Nobel Prize winner in physics was Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, awarded in 1901 for the discovery of X-rays. In total, for work directly related to the application of Roentgen's discovery in science, Nobel Prizes were awarded 12 more times, including in physics (seven times), in physiology and medicine (three times) and in chemistry (twice): in 1914, 1915, 1917, 1922, 1924, 1927, 1936, 1946, 1962, 1964, 1979 and 1981.
In 1915, Australian physicist Sir William Lawrence Bragg was awarded the Nobel Prize "for services to the study of crystals using x-rays." In the entire history of the award, he is known as the youngest laureate - at the time of receiving it he was only 25 years old.
And although 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai won the Peace Prize last year, Bragg is still the youngest winner in science, and there is little chance that this will change in the future.
Over the past hundred years, Nobel laureates have been getting older: when Bragg received his award in 1915, the average age of scientific discoveries in fields such as chemistry, physics and medicine was no more than 40 years. Today it is 71 years: scientists are waiting longer for the prize, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve serious achievements in science.
Average age of Nobel Prize winning scientists at the time of their award: physiology (blue), physics (orange) and chemistry (red).
Waiting for a call from the Swedes
In general, when it comes to discoveries and inventions, it is customary to associate these achievements with the spirit of youth. It is believed that young minds are more likely to question and question what others take for granted: in other words, to think outside the box.
Paul Dirac, also a physics prize winner for his discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics, even wrote a poem about this:
Age is, of course, a fever chill
that every physicist must fear.
He is better dead than living still
when once he is past his thirtieth year.
(Oh, the fever of time and the chill of age,
What every physicist has to be ashamed of:
He's not dead yet, but it's better to go straight to the coffin -
How to live when he passes thirty.)
It is unknown whether he actually experienced something similar when he was thirty, but one thing is clear: if Dirac had not lived to that age, he would never have received the award - the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
He shared it in 1933 with 46-year-old Erwin Schrödinger; Dirac himself was only 31 years old at that time. However, to do his poem justice, it is worth saying that Dirac made his discovery at the age of 26.
This gap in time - between a scientific discovery and its recognition - is part of the tradition, but according to the authors of the article entitled "Waiting for the Nobel Prize" ( The Nobel Prize Delay, 2014) every year this period becomes longer, and its growth occurs non-linearly:
The break between the discovery and the award: the y-axis is the waiting time (in tens of years), the x-axis is the year the Nobel Prize was received (physics - blue, chemistry - green, medicine - red). Source: Becattini et. al.
The researchers note that long waits, sometimes exceeding a period of 20 years, occur in each of the three fields, however, the largest gap is observed in physics:
“Cases where the waiting time between discovery and receipt of an award exceeds tens of years are gradually becoming the norm for all exact sciences: about 60% of awards in physics, 52% in chemistry and 49% in medicine were received with a gap of more than 20 years "
Peter Higgs and François Englert had to wait the longest for the Nobel Prize in physics, which they were eventually awarded for their theory predicting the existence of bosonic particles (1946). However, the discovery of the Higgs bosons did not take place until 2013: scientists waited 49 years for the award.
(Higgs, 84, did not have a mobile phone and was eating lunch at the hour when the announcement was made. He was unaware of what had happened until a passing driver stopped him and congratulated him on the good “news.” Higgs later admitted to the BBC: "" What, what other news?“- I said then”).
In 1888, Alfred Nobel's brother Ludwig died in St. Petersburg. But French newspapers mixed up the name and published news about the death of the inventor of dynamite. The news called Nobel a “merchant of death” who made his millions in blood. Alfred was impressed by what he read, and he decided to do something to be remembered in a positive way. Seven years later, Nobel signed a will, according to which most of his fortune should go to the establishment of prizes in the field of literature, physics, chemistry, health or physiology, as well as for the promotion of peace. And since 1969, at the proposal of the Swedish Bank, a prize in the field of economics has also been awarded.
02
Alfred Nobel was also a playwright. Already near his death, he completed the tragedy “Nemesis” in four acts. After the play was published, the Catholic Church declared it blasphemous, and all but three copies of the play were destroyed. The first surviving edition was published only in 2003, and in 2005, 109 years after the author's death, the premiere took place in Stockholm.
03
Mahatma Gandhi (you probably remember that skinny leader of India in the Civilization series) was nominated for the Peace Prize five times, but never received it. After his assassination in 1948, the Nobel Committee admitted its mistake and decided to dispense with the award that year.
04
The 102nd element of Mendeleev's periodic table is named Nobelium. It was obtained almost simultaneously in the sixties at the Soviet Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and the University of California, Berkeley. It is noteworthy that Soviet scientists named the element joliotium in honor of the French physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie (Jl), and the Americans named it nobelium (No). Moreover, both names were in circulation until the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry approved the final one - Nobelium. Although the Americans beat us to the name, they recognized Soviet scientists as the discoverers of the element. But they did not give the Nobel Prize for this.
05
There is a myth that the Nobel Prize in mathematics is not awarded because Alfred's wife left him for a mathematician. In fact, Nobel never married, and considered mathematics too abstract a science. He wanted the prize to be given to people who have done something useful for humanity. (I wish I could go back many years ago and tell my math teacher this!)
06
Everyone knows the parody version of the Nobel Prize - the Ig Nobel Prize (also called the Ignobel Prize), which is awarded for the most useless research. The only person to have received both prizes is Andrei Geim, a Dutch scientist born in the USSR. He received an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for using magnets to levitate frogs, and a Nobel Prize in 2010 together with Konstantin Novoselov for experiments in the study of graphene
07
At the end of the 30s of the last century, German physicists James Frank and Max von Laue, fearing that their gold Nobel medals might be confiscated by the Nazis who came to power, handed them over to another prize winner, the Dane Niels Bohr, for safekeeping. When Denmark was occupied by German troops in 1940, he gave the medals to the chemist György de Hevesy (also, by the way, a future winner of the chemistry prize), who dissolved them in aqua regia. The jar with the solution did not arouse suspicion among anyone, and after the war, de Hevesy isolated the gold from there, transferred it to the Royal Swedish Academy, and the German physicists had their medals cast again.
08
In 1971, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. He was nearsighted and during the ceremony he tripped on a step and fell. And when he came to thank the King of Sweden, who was sitting among other guests, he identified himself and began to bow to the palace guard. After this incident, the monarch began to be seated on stage.
He is the child of emigrants from Russia and Ukraine.
One of the Nobel Prize winners in physics this year was 96-year-old scientist Arthur Ashkin from the USA. We wrote about all the award winners in the material. Now we are talking about Arthur Ashkin so that you know that scientists are not only Albert Einstein or Dmitry Mendeleev.
Who is Arthur Ashkin?
Arthur Ashkin is a scientist and physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018.
Is Arthur Ashkin Russian?
Arthur Ashkin was born in 1922 in New York and lived all his life in the USA. But his parents were emigrants from Russia and Ukraine.
Why did Arthur Ashkin receive the Nobel Prize in Physics?
Arthur Ashkin invented "optical tweezers" that can capture particles, atoms and viruses. Such “tweezers” can hold very tiny objects: for example, living cells in order to examine them.
Arthur Ashkin became the oldest Nobel Prize laureate in its history
Arthur Ashkin is now 96 years old and the oldest scientist to win a Nobel Prize. Before him, the oldest was 90-year-old Leonid Gurvich, who received a prize in economics.
Arthur Ashkin was unable to give an interview to the Nobel Committee because he was “busy writing a new scientific paper”
In the morning, even before the announcement of the prize winners, Arthur Ashkin received a call from the Nobel Committee and was asked to give a short interview. Ashkin said that he is busy writing a new scientific work. We would do this at 96 years old.
