Who Wins Nobel Prizes? (construction-physics.com) 102
The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine than any other nation, with the UK and Germany following in second and third place, according to an analysis of nearly 900 prize-winning publications.
Universities account for roughly three-fourths of Nobel Prize-winning research, with a small number of elite institutions producing a disproportionate share of winners. Cambridge University leads with 32 prizes, followed by Harvard (22) and Columbia (13). While prizes are concentrated among researchers from the US, UK, and Germany, 43 countries have produced at least one scientific Nobel laureate.
Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, Japan leads with 11 prizes, while Argentina, China, and India have only one or two each. The average age of Nobel Prize winners has steadily increased from about 45 in the 1920s to 65 in the 2010s, though the age at which scientists perform their groundbreaking work has remained relatively constant at around 40.
Universities account for roughly three-fourths of Nobel Prize-winning research, with a small number of elite institutions producing a disproportionate share of winners. Cambridge University leads with 32 prizes, followed by Harvard (22) and Columbia (13). While prizes are concentrated among researchers from the US, UK, and Germany, 43 countries have produced at least one scientific Nobel laureate.
Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, Japan leads with 11 prizes, while Argentina, China, and India have only one or two each. The average age of Nobel Prize winners has steadily increased from about 45 in the 1920s to 65 in the 2010s, though the age at which scientists perform their groundbreaking work has remained relatively constant at around 40.
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At the time we thought it was for "not being George W Bush", but it turns out that some of the Nobel judges are traveling the opposite way in time and it's really for "not being Trump". That would explain some of the more bizarre decisions on who gets the prize: Time's Arrow [wikipedia.org].
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For being black.
Re: Who wins? (Score:1)
It is likely that during Trump tenure the war between Russia and Ukraine will end. It is improbable that Trump would win a Nobel Prize for that.
It is also likely that this conflicts will escalate further.
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The correct answer is, Israelis and friends of Israel
https://www.jpost.com/breaking... [jpost.com]
But is it any surprise when ghouls like Alan Dershowitz get to decide?
https://thehill.com/homenews/5... [thehill.com]
It's no surprise either that warmongers like Kissinger and Obama get a peace prize.
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I stopped paying attention when Obama won the nobel peace prize for being not-Bush.
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There have been peace prize winners far worse than him. Even Obama was a bit embarrassed by the win.
Yassar Arafat, for example. Al Gore.
Apparently, the entire EU won in 2012. Well, not starting WWIII in over 60 years counts for something, I guess.
In a few more years they might nominate Putin.
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The Palestinians have not attacked or tried to conquer anyone. [wikipedia.org] great idea to assasinate the leader of the land you currently reside in.
Thats effectively what Yassar Arafat did for peace
except he walked away from camp david 2000 and instead wanted to go do the second intifada instead, setting the conflict back to it's worst state its ever been and not getting better now. arafat was an effective paramilitary man but an awful leader and negotiator
the thing you miss about rabin is that while he was assasinated by an extremist from israel the very fact he got
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if youre going to scold people on facts read some history and get some perspective first.
Funny you say that while blaming leftist for the actions of the Palestinians instead of acknowledging the Israelis pushing the Palestinians off their own land more and more every year to the point that 8% of the Israeli population now lives on land recognized internationally as Palestinian territory. Or the fact that prior to colonial efforts there was only a small towns worth of Jews living in modern day Israel https://www.cjpme.org/fs_007 [cjpme.org] so you cant really claim they had any entitlement to any of the ter
Trend lines on Nobel Prizes? (Score:2)
You may not read AC, but you propagate its vacuous Subject? I think the grand summary approach is not interesting, but the trend lines might indicate something. Will China or India dominate in the future? Maybe that would best be investigated by considering the native countries of the winners in technical fields? (Yeah, I would exclude literature, peace, and economics from the meaningful data.)
Anyway, once again a potentially interesting topic seems to have been wrongfooted into trolldom. At least so far I
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I didn't read the AC, didn't even see their post. Replied to CublicleZombie, who isn't an AC.
As for the lack of substance, that's why I don't read AC. Well, I occasionally see an AC post if they're upmodded enough, but that is rare.
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My bad? Because you got me to read the AC looking for the context of the Subject? Actually, the bit that Slashdot shows for the collapsed FP was enough to guess that it was racist trollage. But vacuous and open Subjects appear to have become another Sophistic tactic to prevent interesting discussions...
I tend to sort of agree with you that ACs' comments that are modded up are sometimes worth seeing--but that is predicated on the moderation working well and it is not working well. My memories of better moder
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If you wanted a wider discussion, being less focused on critiquing me would have been good.
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So much for trying to be polite. Yeah, I know I write badly and elliptically, but perhaps you should work on your reading skills?
Ain't nobody here but us ostriches, by the way. The meaningful lifespan of a public discussion on Slashdot is one day. Perhaps you hadn't noticed? Another part of reading skills? But in a way that's convenient for me. Since I generally visit only once a day, whenever I reply to a reply it can already be filed under M for moot.
Re: Who wins? (Score:1)
When was the time they elected anybody conservative?
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How about when Bob Dylan won one for literature? I like Dylan just fine, but since when do Nobel Prizes pinch hit for a Grammy?
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It's no surprise either that warmongers like Kissinger and Obama get a peace prize.
How much carpet bombing did Obama do again?
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The correct answer is, Israelis and friends of Israel
You seem to have lost the thread of this conversation. Your link does nothing to suggest that Israelis and friends of Israel win Nobel Prizes, it's just an editorial about someone who the author thinks shouldn't win a prize.
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Don't worry, President Trump is working hard to address this imbalance
Re:The EU should sue (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry, President Trump is working hard to address this imbalance
You lost me at "working". :-)
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Trump may be stupid, dumb, illiterate, a fascist and other things, but lazy?
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In his first term, he spent more days on the golf course than he did in the office. So, yes, lazy.
Re:The EU should sue (Score:5, Informative)
In his first term, he spent more days on the golf course than he did in the office. So, yes, lazy.
According to Trump Golf Track [trumpgolftrack.com], so far this term, he's been in office 65 and spent 17 days golfing for 26.15% days golfing.
I'll add that the (now defunct) TrumpGolfCount site that was up during his first term had a LOT of detailed data about when/where and costs; the site I mentioned above doesn't. The article Donald Trump’s golfing tab in first month of second term: You won’t believe how much he spent [pennlive.com] has some information about the taxpayer costs of his golf outings and visits to his resorts, like Mar-a-Lago -- $3,383,250 for each trip (from 2019) -- and notes:
It puts Trump on pace to spend well over $100 million golfing in 2025. HuffPost reported that he spent an estimated $152 million, golfing 293 days at his own resorts, during his first term.
Those are taxpayer dollars, some of which goes into his pocket, including what he charges the Secret Service for their rooms/meals, etc... at this resorts. Also from that article:
“It’s clear that when the Trump administration considers the definition of corruption and wasteful spending, it doesn’t count spending that ends up in the president’s pockets,” Jordan Libowitz of government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics told HuffPost. “By visiting his for-profit businesses roughly a third of his days in office, Trump is directing government spending to follow him there and profiting off the trip.
“It would be one thing if he went to Camp David every few days to hit golf balls,” Libowitz added. “It’s hard to see this as anything other than using the presidency to prop up his businesses.”
Maybe Elon and DOGE should look into this for waste, fraud and abuse ...
Re: The EU should sue (Score:2, Informative)
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He's also famous for not bothering to read what's put in front of him unless it's a single sheet with bullet points and colour illustrations, though that may just be because he's barely literate.
Makes you wonder about all those Executive Orders he's signed, that minions with agendas and The Heritage Foundation almost certainly wrote...
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Trump already wins trophies at his own golf courses. I thought he was against participation trophies?
What a ground breaking discovery! (Score:2)
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These guys figured out how to put the award recipients and some metadata into an Excel file, then calculate percentages based on categories. Publish!
I bet the author Brian Potter is now in line for a Nobel Peace Prize for speaking the truth in journalism. Looks like I have a new hero!!!!
What's all the drama about? (Score:5, Informative)
Whoever has the means, equipment, knowledge and persistence to formalise and confirm breakthrough theories is the one who gets it. Yes, many of those requirements are skewed towards rich countries and universities but it's just reality of it, a statistical concentration of data points, and it makes sense since scientific discoveries tend to happen where people do science. Duh.
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It's "Guns, germs and steel", not to mention the neocolonization of the west and its allies, and outright colonization on the part of Israel. I love the westoid take of "big brains get it all, sorry!" as if the Arabic world didn't hold on to a significant amount of ancient knowledge while europeans were burning their texts and shitting in the street.
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I guess the Arabic world would have gotten most of the ancient Nobel Prize equivalents, if they would have existed at the time. Good for them.
We are in the present, however.
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I guess the Arabic world would have gotten most of the ancient Nobel Prize equivalents, if they would have existed at the time. Good for them.
We are in the present, however.
It depends on which time time period one focuses on. The Greeks and Roman certainly would have won quite a few. The Arabs for sure. Also the Mesopotamians, before they would have been considered Arabs. And don't forget about the Chinese, Indians, and Mayans.
The most important thing about any election or award is who gets to vote. It's not a huge surprise that a Scandanavian award has focused mostly on Northern Europeans and their diaspora. Whether individual award winners deserve their awards is an or
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There is always an equal distribution of any behaviorally-related parameter, most frequently to a power law. TFA would be a "dog bites man" class of report.
It is no shocker that rich countries who have sufficient wealth to plow it into R&D are the ones who will come out on top in this metric. Moreover, this is yet another example of success breeding success: where there have been good outcomes, more money and talent follows, creating a virtuous cycle.
Much more interesting would be a Cinderella story a
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There are a few, but they are exceptions.
This whole subject reminds me of the contemporary outrage stemming from "most writers and artists of the past were Rich Western White Males", well, doh, Maslow's Pyramid would like to have a word.
Re:What's all the drama about? (Score:5, Interesting)
Whoever has the means, equipment, knowledge and persistence to formalise and confirm breakthrough theories is the one who gets it.
Also, a penis helps. I guess it's hard to grasp the medal without one or something.
Yeah yeah, I know you'll all mod me down, but why the fuck did Moerner get the 2014 Nobel prize for chemistry? OK, so Hell deserved it, he did the work, developed 4pi microscopy and STED. Gustafsson deserved it for SIM, but he was dead so out of the running. Betzig also deserved it. So, where's Xiaowei Zhang? She published the same technique as Betzig a few weeks before (they clearly both developed it independently). But somehow it went to... Moerner. Who did what exactly?
It's the area I know the most about with regard to nobel prizes, so I know for a fact it was fucked.
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I'm just curious if you just took one datapoint and extrapolated? Yeah there's a gender gap in nobel prizes, but can you point to other cases? Also in the case you know the most about you may have missed something obvious that may have nothing to do with genitalia, and that's that most people can't pronounce the woman's name. Why does it have to be a penis rather than simply white skin? Racism is just as rampant as sexism in the world.
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I'm just curious if you just took one datapoint and extrapolated?
One? The Nobel prize committee has a long and storied history of such shenanigans. This is a somewhat recent one that I happen to know about because I know the area
but can you point to other cases?
Really? One of the most famous is Jocelyn Bell not getting it.
Why does it have to be a penis rather than simply white skin? Racism is just as rampant as sexism in the world.
I mean really she had no chance.
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Jocelyn Bell was a doctoral student at the time of her discovery. Since the start, the convention has been that students, including postgraduate students, CANNOT win a Nobel Prize. Bell was ineligible for the prize. It has nothing to do with sex or race.
Pretty interesting editing out of the summary (Score:2)
Summary: "Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, Japan leads with 11 prizes, while Argentina, China, and India have only one or two each"
Article: "Other than Japan and Israel, there are almost no countries outside Europe and the Anglosphere"
Emphasis mine. Israel has 6 in Chemistry and a number in Economics as well.
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Emphasis mine. Israel has 6 in Chemistry and a number in Economics as well.
Yeah, but it's a US colony, so does it really count?
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"If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize."
-Voltaire
So who is actually the colony?
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You're not allowed to criticize them because they're doing the work our evangelical christians want done, so the end of the world can come quicker.
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Looking at the Peace Prize alone, going back to 1990 before I got tired:
Iran, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Philippines, Ethiopia, Iraq, DRC (Congo), Colombia, Tunisia, Pakistan, India, Yemen, Liberia, China, Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, South Korea, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Guatemala, Soviet Union (1990).
Obama was the last US winner in 2009.
The trick with the other prizes in things like science is that it requires the country be doing bleeding edge science to win. While hitting the news enough
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I wonder if we examined the winners and looked at their country of origin, not of citizenship or residence at the time of the award, if things would change?
No need to wonder, it's in TFA: ctrl-f for "Nobel Prizes By Country of Birth". China's the first non- North American, non- European country in that list at #14.
The most important metric (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then the US would not be number 1 anymore. Might have repercussions for the authors of this study if that happens.
Re:The most important metric (Score:5, Informative)
Ranking of institutions, Nobel laureates per million graduates:
1 École Normale Supérieure - France - 1350
2 California Institute of Technology - US - 670
3 Harvard University - US - 320
4 Swarthmore College - US - 270
5 Cambridge University - UK - 250
6 École Polytechnique - France - 250
7 Massachusetts Institute of Technology - US - 250
8 Columbia University - US - 210
9 Amherst College - US - 190
10 University of Chicago - US - 170
Figure 7 of: Where Nobel winners get their start. Nature 538, 152 (2016) https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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The denominator there is undergraduate alumni. The article wasn't clear whether it was counting all alumni, or just the ones since Nobel prizes started being awarded. Even if the latter, undergraduates don't generally get Nobel prizes, so a better denominator might be the number of research faculty, or the number of hours of protected research time.
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undergraduates don't generally get Nobel prizes,
In this table they do. This table is only the fraction of undergrad students who later in life got a Nobel prize. It could be read as a benchmark of how good was an institution to train kids into a Nobel laureate mindset.
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Ah, you're right, that's right in the subtitle of the article.
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Not any more (Score:3, Insightful)
With academia under assault from this administration, those days are over and probably never coming back.
Most important research today is done... (Score:2)
...by large teams or collaborations
Picking a single person to win the prize makes little sense in this situation
As AI assistants improve and become more useful, it will make less sense
As the article pointed (Score:2)
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Buried Lede (Score:3)
This second dataset needed some repairing. Around a third of the institutional affiliations were missing, so I used Claude 3.7 Sonnet to fill in the blanks. When checking Claude’s work, I was surprised at how accurate it was. Of the roughly 275 entries Claude filled in, there were errors in fewer than 10 of them, and the errors that it did make were often borderline (i.e: a publication coming out in a given year and an author moving institutions that same year, or an author having multiple affiliations).
In fact, Claude’s answers proved to be more accurate than the original dataset, at least for institutional affiliation. Spot-checking the original dataset revealed numerous errors, so I also ended up using Claude to make corrections to the original dataset. Altogether Claude (with me checking) fixed probably ~100 errors in categories like institutional affiliation and publication date.
Not just Americans, immigrant Americans (Score:5, Informative)
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He/his admiration/financial backing apparatus sure is working hard to ensure that private and public institutions alike institutions are not permitted to determine what constitutes merit, and I'll give you exactly zero guesses as to why that is. It sure isn't his/his administration/his financial backing apparatus favorable views to people from other places - citizens, legal immigrants or otherwise. If you don't think these are deliberate actions to adjust the color balance on their reality TV sets, I dunno
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"Like us, Trump supports racist and sexist discrimination, but *he* does it wrong."
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That's precisely the dumbfuck response I was anticipating. Excellent work.
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Re:Not just Americans, immigrant Americans (Score:5, Informative)
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Name a single country there that should not be blocked.
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Name a single country there that should not be blocked.
Iran? They grow lots of cherries there. You'd like it.
Re:Not just Americans, immigrant Americans (Score:4, Insightful)
There are legal migrants scared from losing their acquired rights for voicing their views in political issues, though. That should never happen in a free, democratic country.
Of course, nobody said the USA would remain either.
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...And that's your opinion.
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Science? The fascists in charge in the US now think that only gets in the way...
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Around 35% of all US Nobel prizes are won by immigrants to the US. See https://iir.gmu.edu/publications/nobelprize [gmu.edu]. More than two thirds of all Nobels to the US are either immigrants or 1st generation children of immigrants. The US economic and scientific success relies heavily on its immigrant population. Unfortunately, the current US administration is hell-bent on destroying everything that makes immigrants want to come to the US when it isn't actively harassing and deporting those people.
That's an interesting fetish you have there.
What is it specifically that you think would prevent people who were born here from winning prizes?
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To win more Nobel prizes... (Score:2)
Ig Nobel? (Score:3)
Ig Nobel prize is much more fun... Often hilarious stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Men, Mostly (Score:2)
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TFA has that as a figure: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/... [dwcdn.net]
Unfortunately, he didn't number his figures, so had to try and deep link that figure instead of a more useful cite.
UC Berkeley? (Score:2)
David Hume would like a word (Score:2)
The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine than any other nation
Just because the US has won more prizes in the past, says nothing about how many it will win in the future.
If one was to make a prediction, one would hazard a guess that the current Trump policies on education will lead to poorer quality university education and research, with top quality researchers moving elsewhere (France inviting US scientists [msn.com]). Certainly, I think that many considering moving to the US for post-doc or higher positions will be re-examining the advisability of that move.
Would you want to
This will soon end (Score:2)
A surprisingly large fraction of the US Nobel Price winners are immigrants born and initially educated in other nations, not US-schooled native citizens. They were drawn to the top universities to start their scientific career. During their one, two or three decades in the labs toiling at their research projects they became US citizens before they received the Price.
Due to the current political climate, the top talents have begun to leave the US, not move into it. The EU is preparing a program to lure top