Nobel Prize Winners

Here we reveal which universities have been ahead of the curve in all Nobel Prizes awarded since 2000, as the annual list of Nobel Prize winners over the past decade shows.

While the official Nobel Prize website lists 896 Nobel Prize winners when they indicate the country in which the winner lived at the time of the award, the list includes a total of 1105 memberships. The top map shows the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to the country that receives the most awards in Africa, based on a list of the country where the Nobel Prize winner lives.

Columbia University first received the Nobel Prize in 2008, when Martin Chalfie received the prize for his work in the field of molecular biology. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1946) went to Dr. H. M. B. K. Gebbia, chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who showed nucleoproteins in the activity of tobacco mosaics. African research institutions, not a single African Nobel Prize winner is affiliated to an African research institution, as the Nobel Prize Laureate Foundation has stated. [Sources: 3, 4, 7]

Since then, 950 individuals and organizations have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics 597 times. From 1901 to 2017, 923 individuals or organizations were awarded 585 times, and 950 times since then, 950 people or organizations. [Sources: 0, 8]

Of the Nobel Prizes awarded to laureates from Western countries, more than half (12) have received the Literature (4) and Peace Prizes (8). If you include Nobel laureates from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway, the total number of Nobel prizes awarded in the Western world exceeds 1,000 if you include all the laureates. [Sources: 2]

Nobel Prizes for Japanese winners (26) represent almost half of all Asian awards, followed by China (12) and India (11). Asia alone has awarded more Nobel prizes than any other region in the world, and more than twice as many as Europe and North America. [Sources: 2]

To put the three leading countries "dominance into perspective, the US, Britain, and Germany have collectively won 605 Nobel Prizes, more than twice the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to any other country in the world. To put the Nobel Prize's dominance within the United States into context, its winners received 387 prizes combined, nearly double the total of all of Europe and North America combined. Adjusted for population, only 1 out of 41 Nobel Prizes were awarded to 100 million Africans, compared to 2 out of 100,000 for Africa as a whole. The US and Canada, along with Western Europe, have awarded the most Nobel Prizes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (1 percent of all awards), the second least in economics (0.2 per 100 billion), and the third least in medicine (3 percent). [Sources: 2]

Between 1901 and 2017, 68 different countries were awarded Nobel prizes, compared with 11 in 2017. Including the 2014 winners, there are 889 Nobel laureates in total, meaning that African people make up less than 1% of the total number of Nobel laureates worldwide. In percentage terms, men received 94.5% of all Nobel Prizes as individuals, compared with 5.5% for women, the highest percentage of women in the history of any other Nobel Prize. The last year that men did not receive a Nobel Prize was 2012, although nine of those winners were male. [Sources: 2, 3]

John Galsworthy, who won the Nobel Prize in 1932, the year before his death, was the first woman in the history of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [Sources: 10]

Kipling, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, was the first British winner of the prize and also the first English-speaking writer to win the prize. The Peace Prize is awarded to a person or group of people for their contribution to peace and human rights. Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 and, at 88, is the oldest person ever to receive the prize. In the name of defending the high human value of peace, freedom, justice, equality and the rule of law, a Nobel Prize has been awarded in the history of science, literature, philosophy, economics, medicine and other fields. [Sources: 5, 10]

Nobel laureates include Nobel laureates from the University of California, Los Angeles and the US Department of Energy. The Wisconsin College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has a Nobel Prize in science and technology, John F. Kennedy. [Sources: 11]

Nobel prizes have been awarded in physics, chemistry, mathematics, economics, medicine, physics and other fields of science and technology. [Sources: 2]

Economics was first mentioned in the book, which is now commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. Dr. Gilman was not yet 40 years old when he did the work for which he received the Nobel Prize, but he later received a real Nobel Prize in another field of research. The Nobel Prize in Economics, and left much of his fortune to his Nobel Foundation, leaving him with more than $1.5 billion in his own name and $2.2 billion from the rest of the world. In the early 20th century, a Nobel Prize in economics was awarded for the first time in history.