Talk:Nobel Prize laureates by university affiliation
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[edit] Columbia???
The number listed does not match the number of people. While I do not care to go through each article, at first glance I noticed that J.M. Coetzee lacks any affiliation to the school.
[edit] General note to all visitors
The issues of comparability, completeness and affiliation have been raised.
[edit] Comparability
This list serves the purpose of creating transparency. There are several other lists with regard to "university affiliation" on the web but most of them do not indicate the type of affiliation. Often, these lists suggest fame and success of an institution although the affiliations are quite irrelevant. Since this list indicates the type of affiliation, the reader of this article is empowered to create his or her own picture of the myths and lore around certain universities. If some universities do not count affiliates or attendees among "their" nobelists, the ranking is impaired somewhat. But feel free to add as many as you can find.
[edit] Current List Misleading as it Does not Take into Account Nobel Prize Fractions
Unfortunately, none of Wikipedia's Nobel laureate lists is taking into account that not all Nobel laureates are of equal importance. Some obviously had much more impact than others. Wikipedia ought to report how the Nobel committee expresses its own view of the value of individual contributions by awarding fractional prizes. The official Nobel web site explicitly says for each laureate X how much of a Nobel Prize X really got, for example, "1/4 of the prize" or "1/2 of the prize" or "1/3 of the prize" etc. If X got less than 1.0 Nobel Prizes X is still a Nobel laureate, of course, but it's also clear that X could have done better. Everybody in the field, and especially the laureates themselves, are fully aware of the significance of these fractional prizes. Suppose the physics prize goes to 3 researchers, one of them gets 1/2, the others 1/4 each - it's absolutely clear whose contribution was larger in the eyes of the committee.
I think all Wikipedia Nobel Prize lists must be augmented by this crucial information. This will also put in perspective the recent inflation of Nobel laureates in the sciences, which is easy to explain: most of the recent laureates had to share the prize while most of the early laureates got a full prize. The lists of laureates by university or by country must take this into account as well. For example, Glauber (US), Hall (US) and Hänsch (Germany) shared the physics prize of 2005. But we cannot simply add 2.00 points to the US count and 1.0 to the German count. Instead we have to add 0.75 to the US count and 0.25 to the German count (Hänsch and Hall each got only 0.25 of the prize, Glauber got 0.5). Otherwise we'd violate the Nobel Prize conservation law: The sum of the Nobel Prizes per year is constant; you may divide it among many laureates, but then the laureates necessarily become less outstanding on average. Science History 15:23, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Completeness
Several authors have added further nobel prize winners but it`s a time consuming endeavour. If "your" university is not listed, please dont`t complain but help to change it. As to the issue of double counts: we can`t solve it. It is suggested that any double count within a university is indicated by an asterisk so that a double count within an institution is avoided. If a laureate has been affiliated with several institutions (see example of Eric Kandel below), let all institutions share the fame.
[edit] Current List is Misleading as it Treats the Bank of Sweden Prize like a Real Nobel Prize
Many do not consider the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel as a real Nobel Prize, but the present list does not seem to care. The University of Chicago seems to profit most from this questionable view. Science History 15:31, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Affiliation
Several authors have raised the issue of affiliation status. As indicated in the beginning remarks of the article, there is no other way than to take into account any affiliation whatsoever. Any differenciation or categorization of affiliation type will raise unsolvable problems. There is - in my view - no way to create a reasonable way of differentiation. The "most advanced degree criterion" doesn`t work (it would hurt Cornell and Harvard I guess) and the "affiliation at time of award" criterion would disregard the work of the nobelist before the award - although this might be far more relevant to the academic progress of the honoree. Therefore, to avoid any fruitless discussion, please adopt the broadest standards possible. If these broad standards are followed, any university has the chance to be equally represented. The readers of the article will certainly understand the differences.
[edit] Remarks
University of Texas at Austin has a bunch that are not acknowledged. There is an ambiguity here which you may not have realized. A professor who is on the faculty of a given university *when* he receives the prize qualifies as both "on faculty before award" and "on faculty after award". Different editors and users may interpret these columns differently, so that one laureate will end up listed in the "before" column at his institution but another will go in the "after" column. It might make more sense (and more work, unfortunately) to have a column for those who left a faculty before winning an award, another for those on the faculty at the time of the award and another for those who joined later.
Another problem is that it seems each laureate is only listed once per institution even though many laureates belong in multiple columns for the same school. To take one example, Eric Kandel (Medicine 2000) earned his B.A. from Harvard and his M.D. from NYU; he then returned to Harvard as a junior faculty member and later left Harvard and returned to NYU as a professor before moving to Columbia permanently in 1974. He thus belongs in two columns for Harvard and two for NYU but is only listed once for each. A more complicated entry (which isn't in place yet) will be Melvin Schwartz (Physics 1988), who earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia and then joined the faculty, but left before winning his Nobel only to return later. He will belong in three columns for Columbia and, under the current format, it will be hard to tell that he was elsewhere when he won his prize. I realize your ground rules say each laureate is to be counted once, but this makes the table much less useful -- someone who wants to see whether more laureates graduated from Caltech or Yale cannot presume that the list of each school's graduates is complete.
Your willingness to count visiting and adjunct professors along with full-timers is admirable, but most of the top schools on your list don't count these folks in their totals or include them in their official lists. I know, for example, that Columbia's count in physics alone would increase by five if visitors were included in its litst. If other schools do count these folks your table is still comparing apples and oranges.
There are some individual errors here (for example, Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey are both in the "before" column at Chicago but belong in the "after" column instead, while Linda Buck is in the "after" column at Harvard where she should be listed as "before"); I have no time to make corrections at the moment but will return to help edit this page later.
PS: May be a uniform way to count this, is to apply each nobel laurete to the university where he/she earned the most Advanced degree. This will simplify the methodology and will allow them to be counted just once. Another way is to use the First degree but since we are talking about Nobels that is overtly simplistic
Please merge List of Nobel laureates associated with University of California, Berkeley into this article (or something similar). --Apoc2400 22:47, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
- This article is a lot of work and needs some time. The imbalance is not on purpose. But it takes a while to incorporate the 70+ chicago, berkley and other alumni into the database. I hope other users will participate. Assuming that every nobel laureate is affiliated to at least three universities (2 degrees and at least 1 teaching assignment), we`re talking about 2100 names that need to be copied and pasted. We all know what exactly needs to be done. So please don`t complain and give working assignments - participate !!!!
- I`ve added some more universities, I believe it`s appropriate to remove the caveat now. But please, there`s a lot of work to do - please join me.
- Might I suggest that the alphabetization be relaxed in favor of the year of the Nobel award. The reason? The Nobel Laureates tend to get listed on the University pages in order of the year of their award. Then it becomes a simple copy and paste to add names to the tables. Another formatting idea might be to relax the formatting to allow Laureates to be on a single line. Thus a Nobel Laureate who was gone to some school, then become professor at that same school can be on the same line. Albert Einstein and Ralph Bunche are examples of this case. A side benefit of this format might be that a professor who was thought to have been on the faculty before the Nobel award, but who really was taken on the faculty after the Nobel prize, can simply be slid over a column. The Search function of the browser can substitute for alphabetization, which then simplifies layout problems. --Ancheta Wis 16:41, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Alas this entire page is inane, fatuous, and stupid. It makes no sense to compare different universities when the Nobel laureates associated with each university are not selected based on the same criteria. But of course they are not. For example, the University of Chicago list was created without any criteria at all. Thus it is easy to point out sins of commission (e.g. Julian Schwinger is on the list although he spent only 2 months in residence in Chicago in the summer of 1944, not on the faculty but working on reactor theory for the Manhattan Project, with virtually no contact with any faculty members) and of omission (e.g. Alexander Todd was a Visiting Professor in the Fall of 1948; Max Born was visiting faculty in the Summer of 1912; neither is on the Chicago list though there are many on the list with less connection.) I don't know the degree to which other universities have determined criteria for inclusion and stuck to them, but I very much doubt that many have either picked criteria or applied them consistently -- and in any case every school picks its own criteria. Of course in addition the Nobel Prize is blown out of proportion as an indicator of scientific quality, but that is a matter for another rant.Bob66 20:46, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
City College of New York is completely left off of this list although they have 10 alumni who are Nobel Laureates.
* Julius Axelrod - 1970 Nobel laureate in Medicine * Kenneth Arrow - 1972 Nobel laureate in Economics * Herbert Hauptman - 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry * Robert Hofstadter - 1961 Nobel laureate in Economics * Jerome Karle - 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry * Arthur Kornberg - 1959 Nobel laureate in Medicine * Leon M. Lederman - 1988 Nobel laureate in Physics * Arno Penzias - 1978 Nobel laureate in Physics * Henry Kissinger - 1973 Nobel Prize laureate in Peace * Robert J. Aumann - 2005 Nobel laureate in Economics
This does not include any of the others that have been on the faculty at some time.
Kissinger started college at CCNY but transfered to Harvard before graduating. I have no problem with him being counted as a CCNY figure, and if he is included in the list then so should be Julian Schwinger (Physics 1965) who started at CCNY and then transferred to Columbia.
[edit] Duke University Question
I think Charles H. Townes should be added to the Duke list if he meets the criteria. He received his M.A. from this institution. I do know know how to go about modifying this page. Please do this if it is appropriate. Tinlash 01:31, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] LA Times University Nobel list dated October 10 2005
For comparison, here is the Los Angeles Times' list of Nobel prize winners claimed by universities.
It is from an article entitled "A Nobel Prize for Creativity", which is about the expansive ways universities try to claim Nobels. the article is here but I don't know how stable that link is. Notably, the Harvard and Berkley counts are much lower (those universities apparently less expansive in their claims then Chicago). In a strict count which avoids short-term research visits and the like, Cambridge would still be the highest and by a greater margin, given that 70 of their Nobels were undergrad or grad students.
LA TIMES LIST:
The universities claiming the largest number of Nobel Prizes*
1. Cambridge University, England: 81
2. University of Chicago: 78
3. Columbia University: 73
4. MIT: 60
5. Oxford University, England: 47
6. Harvard University: 42
7. Caltech: 32
8. Johns Hopkins University: 31
9. Cornell University: 30
10. Princeton: 29
Bwithh 17:29, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
Harvard's official count of 42 includes only faculty members and former faculty; alumni who did not become faculty members are not on its list but account for most of the difference between Harvard's count and Wikipedia's. U.C. Berkeley officially counts only those laureates who taught there when they won their Nobels or who joined the faculty later; adding alumni and former faculty to the list makes it much longer.
Cornell should have 32 Nobel Prizes, because the list does not include former professor Henry Taube, Chemistry 1983. Sorry, but I have no idea how to edit this page. --Xtreambar 17:19, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Oberlin College
Oberlin College claims that three of its graduates have received Nobel prizes. They are Robert Millikan, Oberlin graduate 1891 (Physics Prize 1923), Roger Sperry, Oberlin class of 1935 (Medicine/Physiology Prize 1981), and Stanley Cohen, Oberlin graduate 1945 (Medicine/Physiology Prize 1986). Reference is http://www.oberlin.edu/coladm/after/nobel.html
~anon
[edit] US Naval Academy
The Wikipedia article on A. A. Michelson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Abraham_Michelson says that he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. This is corraborated by the Naval Academy, http://www.usna.edu/LibExhibits/Michelson/Michelson_navy.html, also by the American Institute of Physics, http://www.aip.org/history/gap/Michelson/Michelson.html, also by nobel-winners.com, http://www.nobel-winners.com/Physics/albert_michelson.html and by the Nobel Prize Committee official site http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1907/michelson-bio.html 7802mark 21:39, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Juniata College
William D. Phillips (Physics Prize 1997) is a 1970 graduate of Juniata College http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1997/phillips-autobio.html http://departments.juniata.edu/physics/alum_accomp.html 7802mark 22:34, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Penn State
Paul Berg (Chenistry prize 1980) earned a B.S. from Penn State in addition to the already noted PhD at Case. http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1980/berg-cv.html http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1980/berg-autobio.html http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Eberly3-2001.htm 7802mark 22:56, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Saul Bellow
didn't graduate from Univ. of Chicago. He graduated from Northwestern, who need a presence on the list since they have 2 on faculty, Bellow, and a few other connections I believe.
- Bellow is dead, though his death is relatively recent and your comment may predate it. Bellow taught at Boston University after leaving the Chicago faculty; I don't believe he taught at Northwestern but have not checked.
- John Pople (Chemistry 1998) taught at Northwestern but died in 2004. Aaron Ciechanover (Chemistry 2004) has been a visiting professor at Northwestern's medical school since 2003 but remains based at Technion in Israel.
[edit] University of Toronto
According to UofT quick facts, there are six Nobel winning graduates. There is also no mention of Bertram Brockhouse in Noted Alumni, although he did graduate from the University.
http://www.utoronto.ca/aboutuoft/Quick_Facts.htm
The page lists 8. 24.57.131.18 02:32, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
- The page listed 8 total U of T people, including faculty. Six of them, including Brockhouse, were graduates. There was no contradiction. FlocciNonFacio 05:17, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] ==University of Göttingen==
in that article they have 44 winners. 85.64.199.180 10:45, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Washington University in St. Louis
Page below claims 22 (+1) winners: http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/archives/facts/nobelprizes.html
University College London UK has 18 Nobel Prizes.
Trinity College Dublin
There were two people associated with the university that gained noble prizes. Samuel Beckett - Alumni Ernest Walton - Academic
I would personaly edit the page but I do not know how to do so.
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Has one alumni nobel prize winner.
[edit] ecole normale superieure, paris
Ecole Normale Superieure has at least 9 prizes along its alumni
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Gabriel Lippmann Louis Néel Jean Baptiste Perrin (1891, 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics) Paul Sabatier chemistry Alfred Kastler (1921, 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics) Romain Rolland (1886) (1915 Nobel Prize in Literature) Jean-Paul Sartre (1924) refused the Nobel Prize
[edit] Texas laureates
Please doublecheck the NL from Texas schools in my recent edit. Im not positively sure which column they belonged to. All the info merely came from here: http://www.tamest.org/nobelprize.html
Thanx.--Zereshk 02:58, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] also
This article needs some alphabetizing (by school names).--Zereshk 20:29, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
- The table is ordered according to the number of laureates connected to each school (column 1), from most to least. Ordering it alphabetically would make it far less useful. In its current form people who want to find a particular school can simply search for it, but if the list were alphabetized and someone wanted to see which schools were in the top five they'd have to browse the entire table.
[edit] Industrial Institutions?
There is a question regarding prize winners who were substantially affiliated with industrial institutions. Strictly, the page guidelines only admit academic institutions. There is one industrial organization which has been home to so many prize winners that omitting it seems like a major omission: Bell Labs, with 7 who did their prize winning work at Bell and 4 more who were substantially affiliated with Bell at some time in their careers. Indeed, there already is an entry on the page for Bell Labs. I do not suggest removing it. (One quibble, since Bell Labs does not grant degrees, there should not be an entry in the column for "graduates". I think that, in the case of industrial organizations, substantial affiliation should be counted as "faculty".) There are at least two other prize winners who were substantially affiliated with industrial organizations. Irving Langmuir did all, or a large part of his prize winning work at General Electric (Langmuir's Nobel lecture confirms this.) William Knowles spent most of his career at Monsanto Corp. and did all, or a large part of his prize winning work while employed there (Knowles' Nobel lecture confirms this.) The high level page notes suggest a broad interpretation of affiliation, so perhaps a broad interpretation of institution is also warranted in the spirit of completeness. It would certainly be possible to note that Bell Labs, etc. are industrial rather than academic institutions.
7802mark 14:48, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
Not just Bell Labs, what about IBM Research and Max Planck Institute, which might be argued is more like the Royal Society or National Academy of Sciences. That is an argument to remove the Labs from this list and create an affiliation list for "other societies, academies, and organizations which do not grant degrees". If that were to occur, then Max Planck Institute would still top the list. --Ancheta Wis 15:35, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Feynman and Bethe
I moved Feynman to Caltech faculty before the prize (1965) because he moved there in the 1950s from Cornell.
But why is Bethe listed on Cornell faculty after the prize. I was going to move him to faculty before the prize, but decided I should ask on this page.
--Ancheta Wis 14:23, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Melvin Calvin
I was surprised by the inclusion of Melvin Calvin in the Minnesota list. His Nobel Bio seems to skip the affiliation. --Ancheta Wis 21:52, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Calvin's bio at nobelprize.org says "He received the B.S. degree in Chemistry in 1931 at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology, and the Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1935. He spent the academic years 1935-1937 at the University of Manchester, England. He began his academic career at the University of California at Berkeley in 1937, as an instructor, and has been a full professor since 1947. He has served as Director of the big-organic chemistry group in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory since 1946. This group became the Laboratory of Chemical Biodynamics in 1960." 7802mark 15:50, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] This page is ridiculous.
Who thought it would be a good idea to use a table like this? This is horrible. Each column for each university should be an unordered list (using asterisks). -mercuryboardtalk ♠ 05:58, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
- I am working on fixing this. -mercuryboardtalk ♠ 07:09, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
- There, I fixed it. -mercuryboardtalk ♠ 17:17, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
-
- There are still problems; to see why, just look at the University of Chicago's "Attendee or Researcher" column. These names are in no discernable order. The "Graduates" collumn is more or less alphabetical, but there are errors. Surely there is a sensible way to organize the entries in each column.
[edit] California Institute of Technology
Removed Mark Muir Mills who never won a Nobel Prize.
[edit] Offical list from Nobel Committee
In case no-one's noticed, the Nobel Committee has their own list of "the university the Prize Winners were affiliated with at the time of the Prize announcement." 202.180.71.156 23:33, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
- The Nobel Committee's list says only where the laureates were based at the time of their award and says nothing about where they studied or other positions they held before or after receiving their prizes. What's more, when they received their Nobels many winners in Literature held academic posts (e.g., Toni Morrison at Princeton and Saul Bellow at the University of Chicago, yet the list on the Nobel website acknowledges none of them. The same is true of several winners of the Peace prize -- including this year's winner, Muhammad Yunus of Chittagong University in Bangladesh.
[edit] Italian University
Università di Bologna: 2 nobel prize: Giosuè Carducci (faculty at the time) - Guglielmo Marconi (researcher)
Università di Roma La Sapienza: 5 nobel prize: Salvador Ludia (graduate) - Guglielmo Marconi (faculty after) - Giulio Natta (faculty before) - Emilio Segrè (graduate) - Daniel Bovet (faculty after)
Politecnico di Milano: 1 nobel prize: Giulio Natta (graduate, faculty at the time)
Politecnico di Torino: 1 nobel prize: Giulio Natta (faculty before)
Università di Pavia: 3 nobel prize: Camillo Golgi (graduate, faculty at the time) - Carlo Rubbia (faculty after) - Giulio Natta (faculty before)
Università di Torino: 3 nobel prize: Rita Levi Montalcini (graduate) - Salvador Ludia (graduate) - Renato Dulbecco (graduate)
Università di Sassari: 1 nobel prize: Daniel Bovet (faculty after)
Università di Milano: 1 nobel prize: Riccardo Giacconi (graduate)
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: 1 nobel prize: Carlo Rubbia (graduate)
Università di Palermo: 1 nobel prize: Emilio Segrè (faculty before)
[edit] Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Her CV does not say anything of Harvard, she is still in Tübingen!--Stone 08:38, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Universidad de Chile
The two chilean Nobel prices, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, both study in the Universidad de Chile. It will be nice if you add them in the chart. Sorry by my english and thank's! Rakela 20:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
