I'd be wary of any such statistics, and trying to draw any conclusion about the current status of a country from that.

For one, the total timeframe of the Nobel Prize is more than a hundred years, and even for individual prizes the time between contribution and award is usually decades. That's a lot of time for possible change in a country.

On top of that, there had been repeated criticism (that has been in part acknowledged by the Swedish Academy) that the Nobel Prize is too eurocentric, so the statistics will obviously be skewed.

I don't have deep knowledge about the Nobel Prize selection procedure, so I'm not going to go into that. But, obviously, all awards will have some kind of bias because a small group of humans make that decision.

However, the US has more per capita prizes than the EU, so not sure that that critisicm is warranted.

Anyways, I also wouldn't draw any conclusions about "the current status of a country" based on number of nobel laureates. Having said that, I do find the statistics interesting, and I'm sure there are some conclusions to be drawn from it.

There probably are papers analyzing this statistic further - if anyone has some reading recomendations, send them my way :-)

the term "eurocentric" normally isn't about NA vs EU rivalry, but rather about "european identity" in the white supremacist sense. (the caveat is that radical equality is also a distinctly european tradition, but still, this tradition doesn't seem to get included under the "eurocentric" label, for whatever reason)

No, the term "eurocentric" in this context means that for the Nobel prize, european scientists' accomplishments are considered "more worthy" than that of non-Europeans.

And thanks for bringing up how racial equality is a European tradition. How could we forget historical eurocentric bastions of equality, like the study of Phrenology and Kipling's "The White Man's Burden".

ra-di-cal equality. not ra-ci-al equality.

I mean, that concept was considerably developed by Indian thinkers. The only eurocentricism here is that poster's personal bias.

Ironically, only a Eurocentric worldview could have one believing that "racial equality is a distinctly european tradition"

There were many celebrated anti-racist movement leaders across the world and in various time periods. The most well-known of these would be the Prophet Muhammad, who famously in one of his last sermons declared "Surely all of mankind – from the time of Adam until our time – are like the teeth of a comb (all equal to one another) and there is no greatness for an Arab over a non-Arab or a non-Arab over an Arab and no greatness for a red-skinned person over a black-skinned person or a black-skinned person over a red-skinned person, except due to one’s consciousness of God."

i didn't say "racial equality", i meant the radical equality that flattens everything. i'm talking about the tradition that rejects prophets, rejects hierarchy, rejects teleology, etc.

Who were the red-skinned people the Prophet was referring to in 600 AD ?

Your username is apt for this comment. Shukran akhi.

The statistics would be different if based on country of origin, rather than current citizenship or location. Peebles, for example, completed his bachelor's at the University of Manitoba before coming to Princeton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Peebles

You might take this way too seriously.

It's just a fun little statistic for micro-bragging rights.

As someone from another tiny country with self esteem issues, I completely get it.

That's all true, but still it's pretty obvious Switzerland is doing extremely well by any metric you can think of.

They are doing well. As would almost any nation that had enormous wealth from being a tax haven. They profit off of the work of others, as any wealthy nation does today, but they go farther than others.

That's not the reason they have "enormous wealth". I think Switzerland understood early on that it's important for them to invest in science, education and innovation because they don't have any other natural resources.

Incentivizing companies like Google to set up shop in Switzerland of course is related to the low taxes, but also access to talent with great technical schools (ETH, EPFL). Furthermore, companies know that people would love to relocate to Switzerland to work for them. This in turn leads to more money for research, academia and education in general. It's virtuous cylce.

Obviously, there are many more factors. And yes, maybe it helped that there was the bank secracy law and criminals and the Germans during WWII parked their money in Switzerland, but I would say that's not the determining factor.

Disclaimer: I'm Swiss, so probably biased.

Other WWII issues and ethics aside, it puts you ahead when other people wage war and you’re busy doing business. War was huge economic loss for the neighbours, and Switzerland was staying in peace.

I disagree. Switzerland produced real value; take a look at companies like Novartis or Roche (or even Nestle). Or the 30 Nobel prize winners, or the top notch academia they have there. You don't do all that just by being a tax haven (Malta and Cayman islands are tax havens as well, also Ireland, but neither is as successful). I have no connection to Switzerland, have only been there once, but when a society works - it works. I acknowledge that.

If you normalised winners by country wealth Switzerland would still be a top contender.

Obviously?

Nationality is often an interesting question. To quote the German wikipedia page on the nobel prize [1] (translated by deepl):

> One of the consequences of this practice is that nationality information is sometimes controversial or confusing. For example, Elizabeth Blackburn, who is also an Australian citizen but is listed in the Nobellists only as an American with an Australian birthplace. In the case of prizewinners who stood between several nations, such as the Alsatian-born Albert Schweitzer, for example, the indication of only one nationality is also perceived as insufficient or, depending on the point of view of the observer, wrong. Another reason for discrepancies are the numerous state changes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some prizewinners, for example, mention the place of birth with the nationality of the time and today, while others mention only one of the two. An example of this is Günter Blobel, whose birthplace lies in Poland today but is listed as a place in Germany. Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, which then belonged to the Ottoman Empire and is now the capital of Northern Macedonia. However, her family was Albanian, which is why she is often seen as an Albanian. However, none of the three states is mentioned in the official list of notices, but the place of birth is shown as belonging to Turkey, presumably because this was already a common name for the Ottoman Empire before the foundation of the Turkish state. Her nationality is declared Indian because she was an Indian citizen at the time of the award.

> Since the Nobel Peace Prize has already been awarded several times to laureates who have worked towards a solution to a conflict over the nationality of a region, the indication of nationality already runs the risk of being regarded as tendentious. For example, when the 14th Dalai Lama Tendzin Gyatsho was awarded the nationality Tibet was declared, although this state only exists in the form of an exile government. In 1998 and 1976, the state received awards for its efforts to settle the conflict in Northern Ireland. Here the Nobel Institute chose Northern Ireland as its nationality, although this region was never an independent state and no party to the conflict sought to establish one. The Nobelstiftung, on the other hand, names the United Kingdom as its nationality after its current formal affiliation.

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobelpreis#Nationalit%C3%A4t_d...

This has nothing to do with national borders. In US, UK and Germany the Nobel's don't come from all over the country but from very small areas.

If Princeton/Newyork/Boston declared independence tomorrow those new countries would be at the top of the list too.

Where cash concentrates Science happens.

National borders do actually have a relevance for Switzerland IMO because it involves serious hurdles, particularly today, for many people to move there so it often isn't just a haven for the best-educated and/or wealthiest people in a region.

Switzerland has relatively strict immigration policies, always maintaining a layer of separation from the EU/EEA and other developed countries though that's less true for EU/EEA countries today, but it still has nowhere near the freedom of movement from other countries that is the case between the rest of the US and Princeton/NY/Boston, or the rest of the UK and London, etc.

Switzerland is part of the EU free movement zone, so European citizen can settle in Switzerland automatically is they find a job.

Right, that's why I mentioned that it's less the case today, but that freedom of movement is always at risk of being cancelled much more easily than a country leaving the EU. There has already been a referendum that passed that would have done so. Also, non-Swiss Europeans can be expelled for certain criminal convictions and (as you mentioned) need to be able to support themselves financially which aren't generally the case between EU states except in extreme circumstances.

It seems to be a combination of things: cash, investment into education, political will, peaceful political climate.

The Bay Area/SV dominates tech because of a bunch of decisions made starting around the 1850s to turn California into a world player.

Maybe you mean 1940s? The Bay Area benefited from fairly massive government subsidies to the Military Industrial Complex in California. WW II shifted military attention to the West Coast and San Francisco Bay was a major Naval Base. The Atomic Energy Commission took over and expanded Lawrence Berkeley Lab and established Livermore Lab. The aerospace industry moved to California due to the continuous availability of good flying weather and proximity to aluminum sources based on hydropower. This was mainly to southern CA, but a lot of aerospace electronics came from the Bay Area. NASA also established Ames Research Center. Plus, as its congressional delegation grew in size and influence, and during the Reagan years, Federal money continued to flow into the state.

In the 1850s there was the Gold Rush, which was unplanned. Around 1900 the southern CA oil boom made it the largest oil producing state in the US.

Look up the history of Stanford to see early investments in the infrastructure of the Bay area. I agree post-war was when the rapid expansion happened but many of the important foundations were laid using gold money and railroad money. Similarly Caltech in the South land shows work prior to world war II. La was already in aerospace powerhouse when world war II happened.

Thanks for pointing out the oil boom I left that out because I forgot

People matter, compare vs the oil rich Gulf states.

If Bronx High School of Science (8 graduates have Nobels---7 physics, 1 chemistry) were its own country and we dramatically overestimate the total number of students who have graduated by multiplying current student population (about 900) by (2019-1935) = 75600 alumni all-time total living and dead, we get one prize per ~10k people. More realistically it's about one prize per 5k graduates or maybe another factor of two better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_S...

And 20% of the laureates are Jewish, while Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's population

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

And 96% are men although men comprise only 49% of the population. Just saying...go men!

This is terribly enlightening. I'm an Ashkanazi Jew of average intelligence, but there seems to be some stigma that Jews - especially Ashkanazi [1] - are brilliant. I'm constantly judged by a very high standard because of that. Be there no mistake, I keep that standard, but due to Anki and Ankidroid and not due to my intellect.

I wonder if there is a self-fulfilling prophecy about that. The 96% statistic hints that because men are traditionally associated with the hard sciences, men typically win the Nobel prizes. What percentage of senior scientists and researchers are women, I wonder, and does that percentage correspond with their representation at the Nobel prizes?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

I'm Ashkenazi as well. Don't know if it makes you feel better but there are way worse stigmas on us than intelligence, so I wouldn't worry about that particular one too much :)

Well...first thanks for ankidroid...

Second, maybe jews are on the list because of that pressure put on them to succeed constantly. Would be interesting study.

You may be interested in this suggrestion put forward by a music critic in this week's UK Spectator.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/do-jews-think-differentl...

I think it's not paywalled if you don't live in the UK.

> Among the bigger countries, Switzerland has the most per capita Nobel prizes.

Be wary of any "per-capita" statistics. Statistically, averages work only if distributions are symmetric. Mean is a poor indicator of an asymmetric distribution.

So, the question is - Do we have symmetric distributions for talent within each geographical area? We see similar arguments in sport but the assumption of symmetrical (normal) distributions for talent within a geographical area is most likely not the case [0]. There are many other factors like income, population density and "coaching" centers that lead to existence of asymmetric distributions. Hence, "per capita" statistics are quite meaningless and mask the real factors that contribute to Nobel Prize winners.

Primarily, the proportion of GDP to research and scientific activity are a better measure to compare countries against [1]. That ensures that most predictive factors are accounted for.

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0274...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968020/

> Statistically, averages work only if distributions are symmetric.

I'm not really sure what you mean by that but I don't think you're correct. The law of large numbers applies to any distribution with finite first moment.

You're probably right in that factors like wealth (and wealth distribution rather than per-capita wealth) affect a country's scientific output. But your stats argument is a bit wobbly :)

It’s a more general statement that applies to say orange production as various plants only grow well in specific climates. Basically, if you’re looking at total calories consumed that is mostly a function of population size, but large samples don’t average out inherent differences.

> I'm not really sure what you mean by that but I don't think you're correct.

Can you explain, in context to what I said - what exactly is incorrect? I am very well versed with the theory of Law of Large numbers. The question is - "Why does the Law of Large Numbers tell us that per capita is a the right metric to compare Nobel Prize output of different countries?"

All he’s saying that the further mean and median are from each, the more importsnt it is that we think about what an average implies about the sample.

Well the median number of nobel prizes in any country is pretty obviously zero...

Another fun fact which show the strong relation between Mathematics and France, which is still strong in the XXe century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of... (France is dwarfing other countries in Field Medals per capita).

It is quite amazing how US keeps attracting top talent in the world. Look at the born in description . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...

Chocolate!

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/courses/bio621/misc/Chocolate%2...

It would probably be more fair to attribute the Nobel prize "nationality" to the university/country at which the scientist was working at the time they made their discovery.

Or the one where they went to school or the one where they did their undergrad or the one where they got their PhD or what if they worked for 5 years of the project in country A and then finished the last year in country B?

No attribution is perfect, but they might still be useful.

You can say the same for the Olympics as well. Ultimately there's no single "fair" system, just different labels, and country that issued your passport is what most people/organizations choose to go with.

Why does anyone care about someone's nationality when they win a Nobel prize?

You don't care about their nationality, you care about what country you can associate them with. You then want to use it a measuring stick for that country's university and research system. It is of course not a perfect scale, but you take what you can get.

For instance, this prize tells you that Switzerland, the UK and the US (or more specifically Geneva, Cambridge and Princeton) seem to be doing something right and that it might be a good idea to change your university system a little in their direction.

> You then want to use it a measuring stick for that country's university and research system.

But why?

That is my second paragraph.

Most academics will have studied and worked in many countries by the time they achieve something major. Nobody's the product of a single country like that. These people have been educated and worked in Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland...

Sure, but then you would want to read about "Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland..." and would be asking why these countries and not for example Belgium or Japan.

Any way you attribute this has some problems, as does trying to condense it to one country. Still just because something is not perfect does not mean it is not useful.

For example, France and Germany have very different systems and culture and you see that reflected in Nobel prizes and Fields medals. At that point you can then discuss which differences are "good" or "bad" by which metric.

People are often patriotic. You feel a certain connection to someone who comes from your country.

But yeah, I agree. One fun example:

I am Faroese. On a technicality, Faroe Islands _could_ be considered the highest rank, at 1 laureate for a population of 49,489[1].

Niels Finsen was born in the Faroe Islands to Icelandic and Danish parents. His higher education and scientific studies were conducted in Denmark.

So an ethnically Icelandic-Dane, Faroese-born, who studied in Denmark.

Does this count as a Faroese Nobel Laureate?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau...

Wait. I thought it's wrong to say "Faroe Islands", because the "oe" already means "Island". So how is this?

Wow, yeah that's true! I have never thought about it before.

From Wikipedia:

"In Faroese, the name appears as Føroyar. Oyar represents the plural of oy, older Faroese for "island". Due to sound changes, the modern Faroese word for island is oyggj. The first element, før, may reflect an Old Norse word fær (sheep), although this analysis is sometimes disputed because Faroese now uses the word seyður (from Old Norse sauðr) to mean "sheep". Another possibility is that the Irish monks, who settled the island around 625, had already given the islands a name related to the Gaelic word fearrann, meaning "land" or "estate". This name could then have been passed on to the Norwegian settlers, who then added oyar (islands).[12] The name thus translates as either "Islands of Sheep" or "Islands of Fearrann".

In Danish, the name Færøerne contains the same elements, though øerne is the definite plural of ø (island).

In English, it may be seen as redundant to say the Faroe Islands, since the oe comes from an element meaning "island". Most notably in the BBC Shipping Forecast, where the waters around the islands are called Faeroes. The name is also sometimes spelled "Faeroe"."[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islands#Etymology

usual human nature?

german won nobel prize -> germans are smart -> im german -> i must be smart

Surely no one's that dumb!

You should meet my father. Hungarian patriot. Our many Nobel prizes make him so proud! With the only minor stain to the story that most of them were Jews.

Note that these counts include Nobel prize for peace which skews the ratings a bit.

If we looked at science and literature only the results would look different. Obviously, assuming the main point of this ranking is to measure a favourable ecosystem for science and literature.

Don't take any of their awards seriously.

It's become a politicized award rather than merit.

Ignore and move on.

If jooz were a nationality they would likely win. They hold 26% of the prizes in physics. Remarkable considering they are 0.2% of the world population. Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

Rich privileged people get to do cutting edge science. How is that surprising?