Facts about the Nobel Prizes

The 2011 Nobel Prizes will be awarded over the next week or so, starting Monday, October 3. Here are some interesting facts and figures about the prizes, courtesy of nobelprize.org.

Friday: Peace

Monday, Oct. 10: Economic sciences

The date for the Nobel in literature has yet to be announced.

By the numbers

840

Number of Nobel Prizes awarded to individuals (817) and organizations (23) between 1901 and 2010. Of them, 67 are laureates in economic sciences. A small number of individuals and organizations have been honored more than once, which means that 813 individuals and 20 unique organizations have received the Nobel Prize in total. The United States has had 326 Nobel laureates.

41

Number of Nobel Prizes and Prizes in Economic Sciences awarded to women between 1901 and 2010. In that time, 776 prizes have been awarded to men. A small number of Nobel laureates have been honored more than once, which makes a total of 40 females and 773 males who have received the Nobel Prize.

90

The oldest laureate was Leonid Hurwicz, who was 90 when he was awarded the 2007 prize in economics.


25

Age of the youngest Nobel laureate, Lawrence Bragg, who was just 25 years old when he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his father in 1915.

2

Number of individuals who have turned down the prize. They were Jean-Paul Sartre, awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, who declined the prize because he had consistently declined all official honors; and Le Duc Tho, awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They were awarded the prize for negotiating the Vietnam peace accord. Le Doc Tho said that he was not in a position to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, citing the situation in Vietnam as his reason.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: THE EPICENTER OF NOBEL CHEMISTRY

Since 1991, 14 people who worked or lived in Southern California have won or shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The winners:

1992

Rudolph A. Marcus, California Institute of Technology

1993

Kary Mullis, who was then living in La Jolla

1994

George Olah, University of Southern California

1995

F. Sherwood Rowland, University of California Irvine shared the prize with his graduate student Mario Molina, who is now on the faculty at the University of California San Diego. The prize also went to Paul Crutzen of the Netherlands.

1997

Paul Boyer, University of California Los Angeles

1998

Walter Kohn, University of California Santa Barbara

1999

Ahmed Zwail, California Institute of Technology

2000

Alan Heeger, University of California Santa Barbara

2001

K. Barry Sharpless, Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla

2002

Kurt Wuthrich, Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla

2004

Irwin Rose, University of California Irvine

2005

Robert Grubbs, California Institute of Technology

2008

Roger Tsien, University of California San Diego

“The moment”

Richard Ernst (chemistry) was on a flight from Moscow when he was informed by the captain that he had been awarded the prize. Reinhard Selten (economics) was with his wife shopping and nobody was around to answer the call. Günter Grass (literature) was due at the dentist when the call came through from Stockholm. Barry Marshall (physiology or medicine) got the call in an Australian pub. Amartya Sen (economics) heard the phone ringing at 5 a.m. and thought something tragic had happened. William F. Sharpe (economics) thought it was a joke when the phone call came. [Want to know more Visit Link] Sharing from

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