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The global distribution of Nobel Prizes traces a shift from Europe to the U.S.
June 1, 2012 | 3
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
More on Nobel Prize history at ScientificAmerican.com/jul2012/graphic-science
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3 Comments
Add CommentI'd be interested to know what percentage of Nobelists in science were theorists, or mainly theorists. Very few, is my impression--and all in physics?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'd also be interested in where the winners of mathematics' big award, the name of which I can't remember, were from. Seems to me it should be part of round-ups like this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, these graphics are a bit misleading. "Each colored bar represents one or more laureates affiliated with institutions in a given country." So a laureate with 1/4 of a Nobel prize may create as much visual impact as a laureate with a full prize. The main problem is that the average prize fraction per laureate has shrunk over time. In the beginning of the 20th century, many science laureates got a full prize. Today, however, most get only 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4. As a consequence, there has been a recent inflation of Nobel laureates. This distorts your graph, biasing its visual impact towards recent decades, and in particular, towards the US, and against Europe. Perhaps not exactly what an unbiased science magazine should publish?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo get unbiased graphics, do the obvious: represent each laureate by a bar whose size is proportional to his/her Nobel prize fraction (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4). Perhaps your artists can quickly fix this.
In 2010 I published a report that takes all of the above into account, for each Nobel Prize type, both by country of birth, and by country of citizenship at the moment of the award:
<A HREF=http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/nobelshare.html>Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares in the 20th Century.</A> arXiv:1009.2634v1 [physics.hist-ph]. http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/nobelshare.html
This paper also briefly addresses your topic US v EU: "As of 2009, Nobel Prize counts of major players by citizenship are: EU >270, USA ~150, Asia >30. Extrapolating current trends, the European share may fall below 50% within a few decades."
Kind regards,
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Lugano
Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Univ. Lugano
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/