Where Nobel laureates were born, against where they were working when they won. 760 prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics, 1901 to 2026, on one map: the countries that grow laureates, the countries that collect them, and the one that has collected more than all the rest together.
A Nobel prize is awarded to a person, but it is also claimed by places: by the town where the laureate was born, the country on their first passport, and the university that employed them on the day the telephone rang from Stockholm. These are often not the same. Of the 760 prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and economics for which the Nobel Prize's own data give both a birthplace and an affiliation at the time of the award, 237 (31%) went to someone working in a country other than the one they were born in.
Draw a line from each birthplace to each workplace and the map below appears: a thick red rope from Europe to the north-east of the United States and California, finer threads from Japan, China, India and South Africa, and a blue web inside Europe that thins out after 1933. Use the prize buttons and the decade slider to filter it, switch to women or men, search for a laureate, a country or an institution, and click any line for the person behind it.
Lines run from a laureate's birthplace (open circle) to their affiliation when the prize was awarded (filled circle). Grey dots: laureates who won in the country they were born in. Peace and Literature laureates have no affiliation in the Nobel data and are drawn, when switched on, as dashed lines to their country of residence at the award. Countries are present-day ones. Sources: Nobel Prize API (Nobel Prize Outreach); Wikidata (CC0) for birthplace and institution coordinates; Natural Earth for outlines and city names. Base map tiles © Esri.
For every country, count the prizes won by people working there and subtract the prizes won by people born there. The United States comes out 131 ahead: 402 prizes won by people working in America, against 271 won by Americans by birth, wherever they worked. Only 5 countries finish in credit at all, and after the United States the gains are small: Switzerland +9, the United Kingdom +2, Denmark and Sweden +1 each.
Net gain or loss of laureates, by country
Prizes won by people working in a country minus prizes won by people born there; present-day borders. Physics, chemistry, medicine and economics. Click a bar to see the country on the map.
The losers are a roll-call of twentieth-century upheaval. Poland's -19 looks like the biggest loss, but 14 of its 19 laureates were born in what was then Germany, in Breslau and the Prussian east, and 8 of them won in Germany: a story about borders moving rather than people. Hungary sent 8 of its 10 laureates abroad, Austria 10 of 15. Canada (-9) lost scientists to the United States next door: all 15 Canadian-born laureates who won abroad were working there; China (-7) and India (-5) lost almost all the laureates they grew.
Until the 1930s the United States was a minor Nobel nation: 12% of the science prizes awarded before 1940 went to people working there. Germany led in each of the first four decades. From the 1940s the United States has led every decade, and since 1950 it has taken 62% of all prizes in the four subjects.
Share of prizes won by people working in the United States
By award decade, physics, chemistry, medicine and economics. Hover for numbers.
A large part of that American haul was born somewhere else. Of the 402 prizes won in the United States, 135 (34%) went to people born abroad, from 40 countries. The largest suppliers are the United Kingdom (20), Canada (15), Germany (12), France (8) and Japan (7). In the 2010s and 2020s the foreign-born share of American prizes was 38% and 38%: higher than in any decade since the 1950s. Of every prize won by someone working outside their birth country, 57% were won in America.
The largest flows
Birth country to the country of the affiliation at the award, present-day borders. Click a bar to draw that flow on the map.
Germany dominated the early Nobel prizes. Up to 1932, 31 of the 99 science prizes (31%) went to people working in Germany, and almost every German-born laureate of that time stayed: only 10% of German-born winners up to 1932 were working abroad. Since 1933, Germany's share has been 7%, and 49% of German-born winners have been working in another country.
Germany before and after 1933
Left: share of each decade's prizes won by people working in Germany. Right: laureates born in the German lands of the day (as the Nobel data name the birth country at the time, including places now in Poland, Russia and France), by where they won.
The prizes lag the history. The Nazi dismissals of 1933 pushed hundreds of scientists out of German universities, many of them Jewish, but their Nobel prizes came years or decades later, in Britain and America: Otto Stern in 1943, Hans Krebs and Max Born in the 1950s, Hans Bethe in 1967. Among German-born laureates born between 1880 and 1929, 18 won while working abroad, 10 of them in the United States and 4 in Britain. The data cannot say when or why each of them left (the list below also includes people who moved as children, or after the war), only where they were when the prize came.
German-born laureates born 1880 to 1929 who won abroad
Click a row to see the line on the map.
Japan had 5 science laureates in the whole of the twentieth century and 22 since 2000. Since 2000 it has been the third most common birth country of science and economics laureates, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom, with 8.4% of all prizes, against 1.0% before. Unlike most other countries outside the United States, Japan keeps its laureates: most won at home, at Kyoto, Nagoya and Tokyo universities and at companies such as Shimadzu and Asahi Kasei. The exceptions went to America: 7 of 27, including Yoichiro Nambu in Chicago, Shuji Nakamura at Santa Barbara and Syukuro Manabe at Princeton.
Japanese-born laureates, by award decade
Physics, chemistry, medicine and economics, by where they were working when they won.
One caveat shows how slippery "where the work was done" can be. Hideki Yukawa, Japan's first laureate in 1949, worked out his meson theory in Japan in the 1930s, but the Nobel data list Columbia University first among his affiliations in 1949, so he counts here as a prize won in the United States. Affiliation at the time of the award is a good guide to where a laureate's career had taken them, and a rougher one to where the winning work was done.
Counting every affiliation the Nobel data list at the time of an award, Harvard University comes first with 31 prizes, then Massachusetts Institute of Technology (25), Stanford University (24) and University of California, Berkeley (23). 9 of the top ten are American; the University of Cambridge (18) is the highest outside the United States. Grouped together, the Max Planck institutes and their predecessors the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes would hold 30.
Prizes by institution at the time of the award
Every listed affiliation counts, so a laureate at two institutions counts for both. Hover a bar for how many of its laureates were born in another country; click to see it on the map.
These counts follow the Nobel Prize's own affiliations, and they match Wikipedia's list of Nobel laureates by university affiliation, which uses the same source, for 15 of its top 20 institutions; the others differ by a recent prize or by naming (I count the Rockefeller Institute as Rockefeller University). Universities' own claims, which often include alumni and visitors, are much larger.
The share of prizes going to people working outside their birth country has been remarkably steady: 24% in the 1930s at its lowest, 38% in the 1900s at its highest, and 36% in the 2020s so far. What changed is not how much laureates moved but where they went: before 1933 mostly between European countries, afterwards overwhelmingly to the United States.
Share born in another country, by award decade
All four prizes, and prizes won in the United States (decades with 10 or more).
The four subjects are much alike: 34% of chemistry prizes went to someone working outside their birth country, 32% in physics, 31% in economics and 28% in medicine.
Women have won 70 of the 1,005 Nobel prizes awarded to people. Before 1960 it was 12 of 314; in the 2020s so far it is 16 of 82 (20%). The sciences have moved more slowly: women won 2.2% of science and economics prizes before 2000 and 7.2% since. Physics has had 5 women laureates in 231 prizes and economics 3 in 101.
Women's share of Nobel prizes, by decade
All six prizes (bars) and the four with affiliations (line). Hover for numbers.
Women laureates in the sciences were about as likely as men to be working abroad: 28% of 29, against 31% of men. Marie Curie, born in Warsaw and working in Paris, is one of the earliest lines on the map; the Nobel data give her no affiliation for her 1903 physics prize, so only her 1911 chemistry prize is drawn.
The Nobel data give no affiliation for Peace and Literature laureates, so they are not in the analysis above. Most do have a country of residence at the award: 224 of 236. By that measure 18% were living outside their birth country, 23% of writers and 13% of peace laureates, far fewer than the scientists. Switch on Literature and Peace in the map above to see them as dashed lines.
Since 1950, 62% of Nobel prizes in the sciences and economics have gone to people working in the United States, and a third of those to people born somewhere else.
Prizes and people. The official Nobel Prize API lists 1,028 laureates, 28 of them organisations. I counted one record per prize awarded to a person, 1,005 in all, so the 5 people with two prizes (Marie Curie, John Bardeen, Frederick Sanger, Linus Pauling and Barry Sharpless) count twice. Names, prizes, years, sex, birthplaces and affiliations come from the API. The flow analysis covers the 769 prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics, less 7 with no affiliation in the API (among them Marie Curie in 1903 and Friedrich von Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal in 1974) and 2 with no birthplace: 760 prizes. Where the API lists several affiliations (83 prizes), I used the first that has a place; only 19 list affiliations in more than one country.
Matching and placing. I matched the API to a Wikidata query of physics, chemistry and medicine laureates by Wikidata ID, checking that prize and year agree: all 668 such prizes matched, 666 by ID and the rest by name, prize and year (two laureates have duplicate Wikidata items). The Wikidata extract also contains a fictional laureate, Sheldon Cooper, who matched nothing. Birthplaces are placed at Wikidata's coordinates where available (664 prizes), otherwise at the API's present-day city point (334), a Natural Earth town (1) or the country's centre (6). Where both exist they are a median 0.5 km apart. Workplaces are placed at a Wikidata employer of the same person whose name matches the affiliation and lies within 60 km of the API's city (474 of the 760), else at the API's city point, a city centroid (284), or a hand-set point (2). Every row of the data has a method column.
Countries. Birth and work countries are the present-day countries the API gives ("countryNow"), so a laureate born in Breslau in 1868 counts as Polish-born. The Germany section uses the country named at the time of birth instead.
What this is not. Affiliation at the award is not the same as where the prize-winning work was done, which can be decades earlier and elsewhere. Birth country is not nationality: many laureates born abroad moved as children. And Nobel prizes are a tiny, idiosyncratic sample of science, decided by committees whose choices have their own geography and their own biases, not least against women.