Study Abroad: Which Countries Have the Highest Number of Nobel Prize Winners?

This week sees the announcement of the winners of the annual Nobel Prizes in Stockholm, Sweden. The prize for each full award this year has been set at 8 million Swedish kronor – just under £73,000!

Celebrations began on Monday for the Prize in Physics. Three scientists shared the award for their work on topology – a theory so complicated it had to be described in terms of a bagel, a cinnamon bun, and a pretzel. Neat.

Nobel Prize winning work may not always be readily accessible to the general public (with or without resort to baked goods). But much of it has hugely influenced public understanding on political, social, and scientific issues.

And, for many Nobel Laureates, postgraduate education has provided a foundation for later discoveries and achievements.

If you are considering postgraduate study abroad, you may have looked at recent rankings – and perhaps checked out our guides to using the tables as a Masters or PhD student.

But what about also looking at the countries associated with the famous academics and prominent thinkers? Listing countries by Nobel Prize winners may not produce the most comprehensive ranking, but it’ll certainly be interesting.

And hey - you’re looking to tackle some advanced topics and produce some ground-breaking research yourself, right?

The Nobel Prize was initiated in 1901, by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish engineer, inventor, and chemist.

Shortly before his death in 1895, Alfred signed a will stating:

The whole of my remaining realizable estate [. . .] shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.

Albert emphasised that individuals must not be discriminated against on the basis of nationality. As such, the Nobel Prize has become renowned as a source of international recognition for work in all disciplines.

Over 573 prizes have been awarded to 900 laureates, the youngest being 17, and the oldest 90 years of age.

Read below to discover which countries faired best from their innovative citizens.

The USA has been home to a whopping 359 affiliated laureates.

One of the most well-known individuals to be awarded a Nobel Prize in the US was Martin Luther King Jr. King was awarded the Peace Prize in 1964 for Civil Rights and Social Justice. King paved the way for reform in the US, campaigning against racial discrimination.

The US won two awards in 2016. The 2016 Prize for Physics was granted jointly to three professors: F. Duncan M. Haldane, J. Michael Kosterlitz, and David J. Thouless.

Meanwhile, Sir J. Fraser earned a third of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on molecular (miniature) machines.

You may be surprised to learn that all these individuals were actually born in the UK! However, each is associated with a different US university, namely Princeton University, Brown University, the University of Washington, and Northwestern University.

Interestingly, no Nobel Prizes have been awarded for US literature. Any creative writers out there?

The UK has been awarded a total of 121 Nobel Prizes, boasting accolades under every category.

Did you read The Jungle Book as a child? Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907 for his prose while living in the UK. So, although he was born in India, the UK gets the benefit!

Other notable figures include James Chadwick - awarded the Prize for Physics in 1935 for his discovery of the neutron within atoms, and Sir Alexander Fleming -awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1945.

Fleming, alongside Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Howard Walter Florey, was responsible for the discovery of penicillin and its effectiveness in curing infectious diseases.

These three scientists were based at the Universities of London and Oxford.

Now there’s one figure almost everyone knows as a famous Nobel Prize winner: Albert Einstein.

Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his contributions to Theoretical Physics, in association with the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (now Max-Planck-Institut) für Physik.

With a thinker like Einstein under their belt, it’s no wonder that Germany boasts 103 laureates.

A more recent German winner is Harald zur Hausen. Hausen discovered that the HPV virus is responsible for causing cervical cancer, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008.

Thanks to his research, millions of women have benefitted from routine inoculations against the disease.

France has produced 67 Nobel laureates. Polish-born Marie Curie is among the most notable French laureates, being the first ever woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Not only this, Curie is also the only female laureate to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes.

Curie, alongside her husband Pierre Curie and fellow researcher Antoine Henri Becquerel, was awarded her first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. The three researchers were responsible for the discovery of radioactivity, with Marie and Pierre extracting two previously unknown substances: polonium and radium.

Marie continued the work, successfully producing radium as a pure metal in 1910. In 1911, she was thus awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Harald zur Hausen, mentioned above, shared the 2008 prize with two fellow French scientists: Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier. Both were jointly responsible for the discovery that HIV was the virus which eventually led to AIDS when left untreated.

Thanks to their research, the lives of many HIV sufferers have been saved, and the stigma around the disease has been lessened.

So, for any potential postgraduate chemists or medics, France sounds like the place to be!

Though the founding country and host of the Nobel Prize awards, Sweden is responsible for a smaller, yet still significant, cohort of laureates.

With a total of 31 prizes, Swedish thinkers have won prizes in each category, with several in both medicine literature.

Selma Lagerlöf was the first female Laureate to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909.

Other notable Swedish laureates include Gustaf Dalén, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1912. Dalén was responsible for the invention of the solar valve, which switches off the beam of lighthouses and buoys during the day.

Swedish scientist, Arvid Carlsson, also shared a third of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, for his work on the chemical dopamine. Carlsson discovered that certain mental illnesses, and diseases such as Parkinson’s, are effected by disruption of dopamine production.

Over 90% of laureates were PhD graduates at the time of receiving their awards – amazing! And there’s certainly a trend in the kinds of degree that laureates are winning prizes for.

The most common field for Physics laureates is particle physics. For Chemistry laureates it is biochemistry, while Medicine typically sees genetics take the lead. Laureates in Economic Sciences win more prizes for macroeconomics. Most of the Literature laureates write prose, so straying from Keats might not be so bad after all.

Feeling inspired? You can search for thousands of Masters and PhDs on our site, either by subject type, or by institution, or both! Happy browsing!