Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to over 1,000 individuals and organizations whose work permanently altered the course of science, literature, and human rights. It has been refused, fought over, withheld, and awarded to people who were already dead by mistake. It has crowned the famous and ignored the deserving. It is, in short, the most human of all honors — brilliance and politics intertwined.
This guide covers every dimension of the Nobel Prize: the six categories, the landmark moments that defined the prize, the records it has produced, the controversies it refuses to shed, and the complete list of recent laureates. Whether you are researching for school, satisfying a deep curiosity, or simply trying to understand why Albert Einstein didn't win for what you think he won for — you are in the right place.
Alfred Nobel's original 1895 will specified five prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. The sixth — Economic Sciences — did not exist until 1969, when the Swedish central bank (Sveriges Riksbank) established it in Nobel's memory to mark its 300th anniversary. This distinction matters: technically, the Economics Prize is not a Nobel Prize. It is formally called the "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." Every other prize has existed since 1901. Economists, take note.
Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Has recognized discoveries from X-rays (1901) to gravitational waves (2017) to machine learning (2024).
Also the Royal Swedish Academy. Ranges from radioactivity to protein structure to CRISPR gene editing (2020).
Awarded by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute. Covers everything from penicillin to mRNA vaccines.
Awarded by the Swedish Academy. The most subjective and most controversial — Bob Dylan won in 2016.
Uniquely awarded by a Norwegian committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The most politically charged prize.
Added 1969. Not in Nobel's will. Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy. Often called a Nobel Prize by convention.
The Nobel committees have no obligation to award the prize every year. Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine have been withheld during both World Wars. Literature has been skipped twice. The decision to award — or to withhold — is itself a statement.
The Nobel Prize archive is not a dry list of names and years. It is a record of human ambition, rivalry, injustice, courage, and occasional absurdity. Each category has its defining moment — the story every Nobel watcher knows, the one that reveals what the prize really is.
Ask anyone what Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for, and most will answer: relativity. They are wrong. Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for the photoelectric effect — his 1905 paper demonstrating that light travels in discrete packets (photons) that can eject electrons from a metal surface. This was the paper that laid the foundation for quantum mechanics. The Nobel committee considered the theory of relativity "too controversial and speculative" to merit the prize. The committee effectively asked him to wait. He waited for 16 years.
The story has a further twist. Einstein had been so confident he would eventually win that — in his 1919 divorce settlement with his first wife, Mileva Maric — he promised her the Nobel Prize money as part of their agreement. He paid her. He was that certain, and that calculating.
Marie Curie had already won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, sharing it with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel. By 1911, Pierre was dead — killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906 — and Marie had won the Chemistry prize for the discovery of radium and polonium, making her the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
But 1911 was also the year the French press erupted over her relationship with physicist Paul Langevin, a married man. The scandal was weaponized. The Swedish Academy, deeply uncomfortable, sent her a letter suggesting she not attend the Stockholm ceremony until the matter was resolved. Marie Curie attended the ceremony anyway. She accepted her prize, delivered a lecture, and said nothing about the affair. She was the most decorated scientist alive. She went.
The 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The prize is remembered not only for who received it but for who did not: Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction image known as Photo 51 was central to the discovery. Watson and Crick had seen Photo 51 — provided to them by Wilkins without Franklin's knowledge or consent. Franklin had died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, likely caused by her X-ray work. The Nobel rules, as established in 1974, state that prizes cannot be awarded posthumously. In 1962 no such rule existed — but the committee did not consider her.
Watson later expressed what he called regret, in 2003. He spent the subsequent decades making headlines for other reasons.
Jean-Paul Sartre is the only person in history to voluntarily refuse the Nobel Prize in Literature. He did so in 1964, citing his lifelong practice of declining official honors. "A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution," he said. He added that accepting the prize would attach him permanently to the Western bloc in the Cold War context, which he found politically unacceptable.
The irony ran deep. Sartre, the philosopher of radical freedom and self-determination, exercised his freedom by refusing the ultimate institutional recognition. He was also, by many accounts, broke for much of his later life. The prize money — which he could not accept after refusing the prize itself — would have been considerable.
Malala Yousafzai was 15 years old when a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley in October 2012, asked for her by name, and shot her in the head. She survived. Two years later, at 17, she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history, recognized for her advocacy for girls' right to education. She shared the prize with Indian children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi.
In her acceptance speech, she said: "One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world." She was still a teenager.
Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences without holding a degree in economics. He is a psychologist. His research with Amos Tversky on cognitive biases and decision-making under uncertainty — the foundation of behavioral economics — demolished the classical economic assumption of rational actors. Prospect theory, which they developed together, is now one of the most cited frameworks in all of social science.
Tversky had died of metastatic melanoma in 1996. Nobel Prizes cannot be shared posthumously. Kahneman accepted the prize, and in doing so, said he accepted it partly in the memory of his late partner. He later described their collaboration as "the best intellectual partnership of the 20th century." The Nobel committee agreed with half of that assessment.
One hundred and twenty-five years of prizes produce statistical extremes worth knowing. Here are the records that define the outer limits of what the Nobel Prize has looked like.
1917, 1944, 1963. The International Committee of the Red Cross has won three Nobel Peace Prizes — more than any other single entity.
Chemistry 1954 (sole winner), Peace 1962 (sole winner). The only person to win two Nobel Prizes in different fields, both unshared.
Followed by the United Kingdom and Germany. American dominance accelerated after World War II as European scientists emigrated to US universities.
Nobel Peace Prize 2014. Shot by the Taliban in 2012 for attending school. Received the prize two years later.
Chemistry 2019, for the development of lithium-ion batteries. He was also a co-inventor at age 57 — batteries reward patience in more ways than one.
Two committee members resigned in protest. The award was for ending the Vietnam War — a war still ongoing at the time of the announcement.
Nominated for the Peace Prize in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948 (the year he was assassinated). The Nobel Committee later expressed formal regret.
Sartre refused on principle. Le Duc Tho refused because the conflict he was supposedly helping to end was still ongoing.
The Double Nobel Club: Only four individuals have ever won the Nobel Prize twice. Marie Curie (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911). Linus Pauling (Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962). John Bardeen (Physics 1956, Physics 1972 — the only person to win the same prize twice). Frederick Sanger (Chemistry 1958, Chemistry 1980). Two of these are in Physics, two in Chemistry. None in Medicine, Literature, Peace, or Economics.
The Nobel Prize selection process is one of the most secretive and deliberate in any field. The mechanics are worth understanding, because they explain why some prizes seem delayed by decades, why some obvious candidates never win, and why the committee occasionally surprises everyone.
The nomination cycle begins in September. Prize committees for each category send confidential nomination forms to qualified nominators around the world: past laureates, professors at designated universities, members of relevant academies, and former committee members. Self-nomination is explicitly prohibited. Roughly 1,000 individuals are invited to nominate each year across all categories.
Nominations close on January 31. Each committee then begins what amounts to a year-long research project — reviewing papers, consulting external experts, commissioning reports. The deliberations are sealed for 50 years. When the 1974 records were finally published in 2024, researchers found evidence of vigorous debate, political interference, and genuine disagreement over candidates including Simone de Beauvoir and Graham Greene.
The announcements happen in October. Physics on Monday, Chemistry on Tuesday, Medicine on the preceding Monday. Literature on Thursday. Peace on Friday. Economics the following Monday. Each announcement is made live from Stockholm or Oslo, with the laureates often receiving a phone call from the committee minutes before the public announcement.
The ceremony is December 10 — the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896. Laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma, and the monetary award. The King of Sweden personally presents the prizes in all categories except Peace, which is awarded in Oslo by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
A single prize can be shared by a maximum of three individuals. If the original discovery involves more than three people, someone gets left out. This constraint has produced some of the most bitter disputes in Nobel history — and explains why the prize has become harder to award as science grows more collaborative.
The numbers are stark. As of 2024, only 65 women have won Nobel Prizes out of 965 total individual laureates. That is 6.7%. Physics has the worst record: only 5 women in 123 years. Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018), Andrea Ghez (2020), and Anne L'Huillier (2023). Between Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963, sixty years passed without a single woman winning the Physics prize.
The reasons are intertwined: historical exclusion from universities and laboratories, lack of nomination by male-dominated networks, deliberate credit theft (as in Franklin's case), and selection committees that were entirely male for most of the prize's history. Chemistry has done marginally better; Literature has the most female winners in absolute terms, with writers including Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Herta Muller, and Olga Tokarczuk.
Toni Morrison's 1993 Literature prize was the first awarded to a Black American woman. Her citation praised her work for its "visionary force and poetic import," giving "life to an essential aspect of American reality." She had published seven novels by the time she won. She published three more after.
The trend, slowly, is improving. Between 2018 and 2023, eight women won Nobel Prizes in scientific categories — more than in any comparable six-year period in the prize's history. Whether that reflects genuine progress or late recognition of work done decades ago is a question the archive will eventually answer. Read more: Female Geniuses History Forgot.
The following table covers five categories across eleven years — 55 prize decisions representing the current state of what the Nobel committees have chosen to honor. Economics is omitted here for space; a full table is available on request.
| Year | Category | Laureate(s) | For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Physics | John Hopfield & Geoffrey Hinton | Foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks |
| 2025 | Chemistry | David Baker; Demis Hassabis & John Jumper | Computational protein design; protein structure prediction (AlphaFold) |
| 2025 | Medicine | Victor Ambros & Gary Ruvkun | Discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation |
| 2025 | Literature | Han Kang | Intense poetic prose confronting historical traumas and exposing human fragility |
| 2025 | Peace | Nihon Hidankyo | Efforts of atomic bomb survivors to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons |
| 2024 | Physics | John Hopfield & Geoffrey Hinton | Foundational discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning (awarded 2024) |
| 2024 | Chemistry | David Baker; Demis Hassabis & John Jumper | Protein structure prediction via AI |
| 2024 | Medicine | Victor Ambros & Gary Ruvkun | MicroRNA discovery |
| 2024 | Literature | Han Kang | South Korean author; The Vegetarian, The White Book |
| 2024 | Peace | Nihon Hidankyo (Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors) | Nuclear disarmament advocacy |
| 2023 | Physics | Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, Anne L'Huillier | Experimental methods generating attosecond pulses for electron dynamics |
| 2023 | Chemistry | Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, Alexei Ekimov | Discovery and synthesis of quantum dots |
| 2023 | Medicine | Katalin Karikó & Drew Weissman | Discoveries enabling mRNA COVID-19 vaccines |
| 2023 | Literature | Jon Fosse | Innovative plays and prose giving voice to the unsayable |
| 2023 | Peace | Narges Mohammadi | Fight against oppression of women in Iran |
| 2022 | Physics | Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, Anton Zeilinger | Experiments with entangled photons, establishing violation of Bell inequalities |
| 2022 | Chemistry | Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, K. Barry Sharpless | Development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry |
| 2022 | Medicine | Svante Pääbo | Discoveries concerning genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution |
| 2022 | Literature | Annie Ernaux | Courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers roots of personal memory |
| 2022 | Peace | Ales Bialiatski, Memorial, Center for Civil Liberties | Human rights in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine |
| 2021 | Physics | Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, Giorgio Parisi | Physical modelling of Earth's climate; complex systems |
| 2021 | Chemistry | Benjamin List & David W.C. MacMillan | Development of asymmetric organocatalysis |
| 2021 | Medicine | David Julius & Ardem Patapoutian | Discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch |
| 2021 | Literature | Abdulrazak Gurnah | Uncompromising and compassionate penetration into colonialism's effects |
| 2021 | Peace | Maria Ressa & Dmitry Muratov | Efforts to safeguard freedom of expression as precondition for democracy |
| 2020 | Physics | Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, Andrea Ghez | Black hole discoveries — formation, Milky Way supermassive object |
| 2020 | Chemistry | Emmanuelle Charpentier & Jennifer A. Doudna | Development of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing |
| 2020 | Medicine | Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, Charles M. Rice | Discovery of Hepatitis C virus |
| 2020 | Literature | Louise Glück | Unmistakable poetic voice making individual existence universal |
| 2020 | Peace | World Food Programme (WFP) | Efforts to combat hunger and improve conditions for peace |
| 2019 | Physics | James Peebles; Michel Mayor & Didier Queloz | Cosmology; discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star |
| 2019 | Chemistry | John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, Akira Yoshino | Development of lithium-ion batteries |
| 2019 | Medicine | William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe, Gregg L. Semenza | Discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability |
| 2019 | Literature | Peter Handke | Influential work exploring periphery of human experience (controversial choice) |
| 2019 | Peace | Abiy Ahmed Ali | Efforts to achieve peace in Ethiopia; end the border conflict with Eritrea |
| 2018 | Physics | Arthur Ashkin; Gérard Mourou & Donna Strickland | Laser physics — optical tweezers; generation of high-intensity ultrashort pulses |
| 2018 | Chemistry | Frances H. Arnold; George P. Smith & Gregory P. Winter | Directed evolution of enzymes and phage display |
| 2018 | Medicine | James P. Allison & Tasuku Honjo | Cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation |
| 2018 | Literature | Olga Tokarczuk (delayed award — announced 2019) | Narrative imagination representing crossing of boundaries |
| 2018 | Peace | Denis Mukwege & Nadia Murad | Efforts to end use of sexual violence as weapon of war |
| 2017 | Physics | Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, Kip S. Thorne | Decisive contributions to LIGO and observation of gravitational waves |
| 2017 | Chemistry | Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, Richard Henderson | Development of cryo-electron microscopy |
| 2017 | Medicine | Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, Michael W. Young | Molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms |
| 2017 | Literature | Kazuo Ishiguro | Novels of great emotional force uncovering the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection |
| 2017 | Peace | International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) | Work to draw attention to catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons |
| 2016 | Physics | David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane, J. Michael Kosterlitz | Theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions |
| 2016 | Chemistry | Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart, Bernard L. Feringa | Design and synthesis of molecular machines |
| 2016 | Medicine | Yoshinori Ohsumi | Discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy |
| 2016 | Literature | Bob Dylan | Having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition |
| 2016 | Peace | Juan Manuel Santos | Resolving Colombia's more than 50-year-long civil war |
| 2015 | Physics | Takaaki Kajita & Arthur B. McDonald | Discovery of neutrino oscillations (neutrinos have mass) |
| 2015 | Chemistry | Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, Aziz Sancar | Mechanistic studies of DNA repair |
| 2015 | Medicine | William C. Campbell, Satoshi Omura, Youyou Tu | Novel therapies against parasitic diseases (ivermectin, artemisinin) |
| 2015 | Literature | Svetlana Alexievich | Polyphonic writings as monument to suffering and courage in our time |
| 2015 | Peace | National Dialogue Quartet (Tunisia) | Decisive contribution to building pluralistic democracy in Tunisia after Arab Spring |
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has won 3 Peace Prizes — in 1917, 1944, and 1963 — more than any other single entity. Among individuals, Linus Pauling is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in different fields: Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962, both unshared. Four individuals have won the prize twice total: Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen, and Frederick Sanger.
Since 1974, Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously. If a laureate dies between the announcement in October and the ceremony in December, the prize is still awarded. But a candidate who has died before the announcement is ineligible — regardless of the merit of their work. This is why Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958, could not share the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine, and why Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, could not share the 2002 Economics prize with Daniel Kahneman.
Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17 for her advocacy for girls' education in Pakistan. She had been shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 at age 15 for the act of attending school and writing a blog about it. She remains the youngest Nobel laureate in history.
No. Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for the photoelectric effect — his 1905 explanation of how light quanta (photons) can eject electrons from a metal surface when light of sufficient frequency strikes it. The Nobel committee considered the theory of relativity too speculative at the time. Einstein had actually been nominated multiple times before winning; the committee effectively deferred the award for 16 years before settling on the photoelectric effect as safe, experimentally validated ground.
As of 2023, each Nobel Prize carries a monetary award of 11 million Swedish kronor (approximately $1 million USD at current exchange rates), plus a gold medal and a hand-calligraphed diploma. When a prize is shared, the money is divided proportionally. The amount has increased significantly over time: in 1901, the prize was worth 150,782 Swedish kronor — equivalent to about 20 years of a professor's salary.
Yes, twice voluntarily. Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, saying he consistently declined official honors and feared being "transformed into an institution." Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam refused the 1973 Peace Prize (shared with Henry Kissinger), citing the ongoing war in Vietnam — a war that he was one of the parties to. Both men remain off the official laureate list. Additionally, Adolf Hitler forbade German citizens from accepting Nobel Prizes in the late 1930s, forcing three German winners to decline.
The Nobel Prize is a mirror. What the committee honors reflects what science and civilization choose to value — and when it gets things wrong, those errors are just as revealing. The prize has celebrated discoveries that saved hundreds of millions of lives: penicillin, insulin, the structure of DNA, the polio vaccine. It has also awarded a prize for the frontal lobotomy (Medicine 1949), which was later recognized as a barbaric intervention. It withheld recognition from Rosalind Franklin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Chien-Shiung Wu, and others whose contributions were equal to or greater than the men who received the prize instead.
Every October, the Nobel announcements generate global conversation about what humanity most values — curiosity, courage, discovery, peace. That conversation is worth having. The prize, for all its flaws, forces it. Alfred Nobel, who read his own premature obituary and did not like what he saw, would probably find that satisfying.
Explore Einstein, Curie, Feynman, and 1,100+ other extraordinary minds at Geniuses.Club. Or see how the greats compare: Einstein vs Newton.