Visualisation
Every Nobel laureate, plotted by age at award
1,026 prizes from 1901 to today, scattered by year and age. The trend nobody noticed for fifty years: the average laureate is now over twenty years older than the first generation.
Physics Chemistry Medicine Literature Peace Economics
In 1901, the first Nobel Prizes were given to a 56-year-old physicist (Röntgen, for X-rays), a 49-year-old chemist (van 't Hoff), a 57-year-old physician (von Behring), a 62-year-old poet (Sully Prudhomme), and a 73-year-old peace activist (Dunant) plus a 79-year-old (Passy). The youngest was Bragg, who won Physics in 1915 at age 25 — a record that still stands.
The average laureate keeps getting older
Run the average age by decade and you see a clear drift upward. Before 1950, the average Nobel laureate was around 52. Since 2000, the average is closer to 66. That's not a measurement artifact — it's structural. The body of foundational work that gets recognised has stretched out as fields have matured. Physicists used to win for breakthroughs made in their thirties; today they often win for work done in their thirties but recognised in their seventies.
The shortest and longest waits
The shortest gap between work and award was Albert Einstein's 1921 prize for the photoelectric effect, awarded sixteen years after the original 1905 paper — and Einstein had been on the shortlist for over a decade by then. The longest wait was Peyton Rous, who discovered a tumour-causing virus in 1911 and waited 55 years for the Medicine prize in 1966, awarded at age 87.
The four people who won twice
| Name | Prizes |
|---|---|
| Marie Curie | 1903 Physics, 1911 Chemistry |
| John Bardeen | 1956 Physics, 1972 Physics |
| Linus Pauling | 1954 Chemistry, 1962 Peace |
| Frederick Sanger | 1958 Chemistry, 1980 Chemistry |
| International Committee of the Red Cross | 1917 Peace, 1944 Peace, 1963 Peace |
| Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees | 1954 Peace, 1981 Peace |
| Barry Sharpless | 2001 Chemistry, 2022 Chemistry |
Marie Curie remains the only person to win in two different sciences. Linus Pauling is the only person to win two unshared prizes.
The shape of the data
| Total prizes awarded | 1,026 |
|---|---|
| Going to organisations | ~33 (Red Cross, UN agencies, etc.) |
| Youngest individual laureate | Malala Yousafzai (Peace, 2014, age 17) |
| Youngest in a science | William Lawrence Bragg (Physics, 1915, age 25) |
| Oldest individual laureate | John B. Goodenough (Chemistry, 2019, age 97) |
Try it yourself
The official Nobel API returns JSON, no auth, no rate limit (within reason). One call gives you every laureate ever:
curl https://api.nobelprize.org/v1/laureate.json | jq '.laureates | length'The v1 schema gives one record per person with an array of prizes (multi-winners have multiple entries). The newer v2.1 API is more granular if you need it.