A Visual History of Nobel Prize Winners

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BACKGROUND

The Nobel Prize is perhaps the world's most well known scientific award. Except for the honor, prestige and substantial prize money the recipient also gets a gold medal showing Alfred Nobel (1833 - 1896) who established the prize. Every year, it's given to scientists and scholars in the categories chemistry, literature, physics, physiology or medicine, economics, and peace. 

The first Nobel Prize was handed out in 1901, and at that time the Prize was very Eurocentric and male-focused. How about nowadays? Is it becoming no bias anymore?

DATA

The dataset used in this project is from The Nobel Foundation on Kaggle.

ANALYSIS

A full version can be found on DataCamp website.













INSIGHTS

  1. The most common Nobel laureate between 1901 and 2016 was a man born in the United States of America. But in 1901 all the winners were European. Based on the charts above, we can find the USA has started to dominate the Nobel Prize since 1930s.
  2. One group that was in the lead from the start, and never seems to let go, are men. The imbalance of gender is pretty large with physics, economics, and chemistry having the largest imbalance. Medicine has a somewhat positive trend, and since the 1990s the literature prize is also now more balanced. The big outlier is the peace prize during the 2010s, but this just covers the years 2010 to 2016.
  3. People use to be around 55 when they received the price, but nowadays the average is closer to 65. 
  4. Both winners of the chemistry, medicine, and physics prize have gotten older over time. The trend is strongest for physics: the average age used to be below 50, and now it's almost 70. Literature and economics are more stable. But peace shows an opposite trend where winners are getting younger.
  5. The density of points is much higher nowadays than in the early 1900s because nowadays many more of the prizes are shared, and so there are many more winners. On the other hand, there was a disruption in awarded prizes around 1940 because of the Second World War (1939 - 1945).