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Trivia

The World of the Nobels

1.Which prize category was not stipulated in Alfred Nobel's will?
o Economics
o Peace
o Chemistry
o Literature

2.Who was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
o Rabindranath Tagore
o Wilhem Conrad Röntgen
o Pearl Buck
o Naguib Mahfouz

3.Who was the youngest person to win the Nobel Prize?
o Carl David Anderson
o Martin Luther King, Jr.
o Sir William Lawrence Bragg
o Marie Curie

4.Who was the only person to win the Nobel Prize twice -- in both Peace and Chemistry?
o John Bardeen
o Linus Pauling
o Marie Curie
o Frederick Sanger

5.What invention brought Alfred Nobel fame and fortune?
o Electricity
o Radio
o Dynamite
o Television

6.Which of the following is not a valid Nobel Prize category?
o Economics
o Peace
o Mathematics
o Chemistry

7.Which of the following relations are not wife and husband Nobel Prize winning teams?
o Joliots
o Coris
o Braggs
o Curies

8.Which Nobel Laureate worked briefly as an assistant to Alfred Nobel?
o Emil Fischer
o Bertha von Suttner
o Jean Dunant
o Marie Curie

9.Which Nobel category does not yet have a single female laureate?
o Physics
o Mathematics
o Economics
o Literature

Answers

1.Economics
2.In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore of India was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
3.Sir William Lawrence Bragg, at age 25, was the youngest person to win the Nobel Prize. He and his father, Sir William Henry Bragg, won the award for their analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays. Carl David Anderson was the ripe-old age of 31 when he received his prize for the discovery of the proton, disqualifying him for the youngest recipient, despite what his biography, The Discovery of Anti-Matter : The Autobiography of Carl David Anderson, the Youngest Man to Win the Nobel Prize, would have us believe. Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize at age 35. Marie Curie was 36 when she received her first Nobel Prize in physics and 44 when she received her second Nobel in Chemistry.
4.Linus Pauling was the only person who received Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace.Marie Curie was the only person ever to win both the Chemistry and the Physics Nobel. However, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger have won two Nobels each, in physics and chemistry, respectively.
5.Dynamite. Alfred Nobel started experimenting with nitroglycerine in 1860 and received the patent in 1867.
6.Mathematics.
7.Braggs.
Sir William Lawrence Bragg and his father, Sir William Henry Bragg, won the award for their analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays. Pierre and Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in radiation. Their daughter Irene, along with her husband, Frederic Joliot, would later win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their synthesis of new radioactive elements. Carl and Gerty Cori worked as a team in their discovery of the catalytic conversion of glycogen and in their marriage.
8.Bertha von Suttner.
Countess Bertha Kinsky responded to an advertisement from Alfred Nobel in the paper for "Wealthy, highly-educated elderly gentleman seeks lady of mature age, versed in languages, as secretary and supervisor of household." She worked only briefly for Nobel since she returned to Austria shortly thereafter in order to marry Count Arthur von Suttner. The two, however, remained friends. Countess von Suttner, a prominent peace advocate, was no doubt a great influence on Nobel. In 1905, she would win the peace prize in her own right.
9.Economics.
Economics is the only category in which the Nobel Prize is yet to be awarded to a woman. In a small (but not cheap!) consolation, the 1995 economics prize was shared by a woman.
Robert E. Lucas, the University of Chicago professor who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the theory of "rational expectations," had to split the $1 million prize with his ex-wife. Seven years before, she had her divorce lawyer insert a clause that would cover such an eventuality. Under the property settlement, if her ex-husband had won the prize the following year, he would have been able to keep the whole thing. Mrs. Lucas was apparently acting on her own set of rational expectations, since eight University of Chicago professors have won the Nobel Prize so far; Lucas was the fifth in the last six years.