The 12 Youngest Nobel Laureates in History

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its Peace Prize on 10 October 2014, the new laureate was in a chemistry lesson in Birmingham, England. Her teachers decided not to interrupt the class. That is how Malala Yousafzai, aged seventeen, learned she had broken a record that had stood for almost a century.

The Nobel Prize skews old. The average laureate is around 60 by the time the call from Stockholm comes, because the committees usually wait decades to see whether a discovery endures. That is what makes the people on this list so extraordinary. Ranked by age on the day the prize was announced, these are the youngest laureates in the history of the prize.

The 12 youngest laureates, ranked

1. Malala Yousafzai — 17 (Peace, 2014). Shot by the Taliban at 15 for insisting that girls be allowed to attend school, she recovered to become the world's best-known advocate for children's education — and the youngest laureate ever, by eight clear years.

1. Lawrence Bragg — 25 (Physics, 1915). The record-holder for 99 years. Bragg shared the prize with his father for using X-rays to reveal the structure of crystals — work he began at 22. He remains the youngest science laureate ever.

1. Nadia Murad — 25 (Peace, 2018). A survivor of ISIS captivity who became a global voice against wartime sexual violence, honoured a few months before her 26th birthday.

1. Werner Heisenberg — 31 (Physics, 1932). Quantum mechanics was, famously, a young man's game; Heisenberg had invented matrix mechanics at 23.

1. Paul Dirac — 31 (Physics, 1933). The youngest theoretician on the list predicted antimatter before anyone had seen it.

1. Tsung-Dao Lee — 31 (Physics, 1957). With Chen-Ning Yang, he overturned one of physics' most cherished assumptions — parity conservation — barely a year after proposing the idea.

1. Carl D. Anderson — 31 (Physics, 1936). He discovered the positron, the antimatter particle Dirac had predicted, in cosmic-ray photographs.

1. Frederick Banting — 31 (Medicine, 1923). Less than two years passed between his first insulin experiments and the prize — the fastest journey from discovery to Nobel on record, and he is still the youngest Medicine laureate.

1. Rudolf Mössbauer — 32 (Physics, 1961), honoured for an effect he had discovered as a doctoral student.

1. Joshua Lederberg — 33 (Medicine, 1958), for showing that bacteria exchange genes — work done at 21.

1. Brian Josephson — 33 (Physics, 1973), whose prize-winning prediction about superconductors was made when he was a 22-year-old graduate student.

1. James Watson — 34 (Medicine, 1962). He was 25 on the day in 1953 when he and Francis Crick worked out the double helix.

What the list tells us

Look closely and a pattern appears: almost every scientist here won for work performed in their early twenties, then waited a decade for the world to catch up. The two Peace laureates are the true outliers — their courage was recognised almost in real time.

"One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world."

— Malala Yousafzai

There is also a family record hiding inside this ranking. Lawrence Bragg shared his 1915 prize with his father, William Henry Bragg — still the only parent-and-child team to win a Nobel together, and the reason the phrase "the youngest laureate" was attached to the Bragg name for nearly a century.

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Related reading

The youngest laureates' opposites are just as remarkable — see our companion piece on the oldest Nobel winners ever. And for the very short list of people who won the prize twice, start with Marie Curie, the only person ever to take home Nobels in two different sciences.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the youngest Nobel laureate ever?

Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17 — the youngest laureate in the prize's history by eight years.

Who is the youngest Nobel laureate in the sciences?

Lawrence Bragg, who shared the 1915 Physics prize with his father at 25. His record has stood for over a century.

Why are science laureates usually so much older?

The committees typically wait decades to confirm a discovery's importance, so most science laureates win in their sixties for work done in their twenties or thirties.