Note: This is an interactive version of the July 2012 Graphic Science, which appears here.
Interactive by Ryan Reid
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The global distribution of Nobel Prizes traces a shift from Europe to the U.S.
June 27, 2012 | 6
Note: This is an interactive version of the July 2012 Graphic Science, which appears here.
Interactive by Ryan Reid
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6 Comments
Add CommentI was looking at the graphic for the age distribution of Nobel Prize winners and wondered if the age represented was that of the date of presentation of the award or when they published the discovery for which they were awarded the prize. It would seem to me that the age at which they did the work would be much more relevant than the age you were when people finally decided your work was worthy of the award. Although it might also be interesting to see the difference between these two events.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat chart - but would like some more background info:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) researchers affiliated with Harvard: is this where they did the research? It would be interesting to know what proportion did their work elsewhere. This is NOT a Harvard question - you just happened to print this for Harvard. I would be interested in the same info. for other institutions.
2) country of institution - same as above, but also, how many were not citizens of the country of the institution.
3)interesting about age: is this due to the delay between discovery and award or are the discoveries later in life - I wonder with this because the number of awards in a year is static vs the number of scientists doing research and wonder about a growing backlog of 'overdue' awards?
4) did you do this for the other (non-science) awards, too?
How many of the prize winners began their careers elsewhere and emigrated to the US? With the crisis in american education and immigration how long before the degrees shift to Europe and / or Asia?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's funny how they forget one of the Danish nobel laureates...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNiels Kaj Jerne (Medicine, 1984) worked on antibodies...
Unfortunately, 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:
Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares in the 20th Century. 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."
Yours,
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Lugano
Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Univ. Lugano
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/
I noticed that opposite the Nobel Prize graphics there was an ad for the Kuwait Prize which only can be given to Kuwaiti and Arab citizens (are christians or jews which are citizens of Arab countries eligible?). In fact only 2 muslims have (to my knowledge) been awarded Nobel science prizes, i e. Abdus Salam in physics and Ahmed Zewail in chemistry. Zewail has lived most of his life in the US and Abdus Salam belonged to the Ahmadiyya sect which by sunni muslims are considered heretic and in Pakistan are legally considered non-muslim. Food for thought....
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