Last week was the Nobel prize announcement week, when the prize winners in the three science fields, along with the literature and peace prize winners were announced. It is the time of the year when science news takes center stage, apart from the times when NASA discovers running water on Mars or the LHC discovers the Higgs boson.
Ahead of the prize announcements, each year, a number of articles about the Nobel prize are written all over the internet and many of them talk about unusual Nobel prize facts. But the best source for Nobel prize facts is either the official twitter feed of the Nobel prize for facts all around the year or the facts page on their website. You can find some of the commonly known facts about the science prizes, like,
- 583 Nobel prizes have been awarded in the three science fields
- 17 women (18 prizes; Marie Curie won twice) have won the Nobel prize in the science fields
- Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger have won two Nobel prizes. Marie Curie is the only scientist to have won in two different fields (Physics 1903 and Chemistry 1911)
- William Lawrence Bragg is the youngest recipient at the age of 25 (Physics 1915)
Before we go into the analysis, I should note that I am working with the data of laureates only from the three science fields (Physics, Chemistry and Medicine). Also my database is built from Wikipedia; though many of scientists' pages are well sourced, there is always a possibility for erroneous data. Also, the classification of student and advisor isn't always clear. I have considered all the names under "Academic advisors" and "Doctoral advisors" to be advisors. Similarly, I have considered all the names under "Doctoral students" or "Other notable students" to be students. With this disclaimer, let's get into the analysis.
The great English physicist J. J. Thomson (Physics 1906) advised ten students who went to win a Nobel prize themselves. One of his students was the brilliant New Zealand-born British physicist Ernest Rutherford, who in turn advised ten students who won a Nobel prize. This genealogical tree of Nobel laureates does not stop with Rutherford's students. In fact, this tree is made up of 49 Nobel laureates and it is the biggest such tree that I could construct within the family of science Nobel laureates.
The photos are either in public domain or are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license
Of the 49 Nobel laureates in this tree, 41 of them won their prize by 1954, which is 22% of all the prizes awarded between 1901 and 1954. This percentage is even larger in Physics where 36% of all the medals awarded between 1901 and 1954 were to the physicists on the tree. The first recipient on this tree is Emil Fischer (Chemistry 1902) while the last two recipients, Arieh Warshel and Martin Karplus won in Chemistry as recently as 2013. The longest linear chain on this tree connects Lord Rayleigh to Arieh Warshel: Lord Rayleigh --> J. J. Thomson --> Ernest Rutherford --> Niels Bohr --> Linus Pauling --> Martin Karplus --> Arieh Warshel. There are still a few scientists on this tree who are currently active academic advisors. Hence we could expect this tree to grow further in the future.
While looking through the relationship between advisors and students, I was surprised to see that there are 11 instances where the student has received the Noble prize before the advisor.
In most of the above cases, the the advisor won the Nobel prize within a decade of his student's win. The most extreme case is that of Max Born, who won the Nobel prize 22 years after his student, Werner Heisenberg. It was an unfortunate case of oversight by the Nobel committee. He was one of the four physicists who were behind the theoretical formulation of quantum mechanics. The other three, Heisenberg (1932), Dirac and Schrodinger (1933) received their prizes in the 1930s, though Born had to wait till 1954.
There have also been 16 instances when the student and advisor won the Nobel prize in the same year.
Except for Max Perutz and Francis Crick, all the other advisor-student pairs shared their Nobel prize.
Apart from these analyses on the advisor-student relationships, I also calculated the number of prizes awarded each year per field. It was interesting to see that this number has been increasing and is approaching 3 per year in all the three fields. Here are three graphs, one for each field, which show the average number of Nobel prizes awarded per year for each decade.
This trend is also evident from the fact that 294 Nobel prizes were awarded between 1901 and 1973 while 289 have been awarded since 1974. This observation shouldn't come as a surprise as science has become more collaborative since the early years and any major discovery cannot be attributed to any single individual. In fact it has been becoming increasingly difficult to award the prize only to three scientists in any field. Most of the path breaking discoveries, like that of the Higgs boson, are made by thousands of scientists and hence whenever the Nobel prize is awarded for such discoveries, it always leads to a few discontented individuals. Though it is in Alfred Nobel's will to not award the prize to more than three scientists per field, we can only hope that these terms can be modified to accommodate all the deserving scientists in the field that is being recognized for the prize. The Nobel prize has risen in significance far greater than what it was originally intended to be; modifying the terms of the prize would certainly be beneficial to the scientific community.
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