Nobel Prizes: Origin, Categories and Indian Winners

The Nobel Prize is the most asked award in general knowledge papers, and almost everything asked about it is fixed: who founded it, when it was first given, which body decides each category, where it is presented and which Indians have received it. Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, signed his last will in 1895 and left the bulk of his fortune to endow prizes for those who had conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. He died on 10 December 1896, and after his estate was settled the first prizes were awarded in 1901. The ceremony is held every year on 10 December, the anniversary of his death.

The six categories and who awards them

The will named five prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. A sixth was added much later. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was instituted in 1968 by the central bank of Sweden on its three hundredth anniversary and was first awarded in 1969; strictly speaking it is not one of Nobel's own prizes, though it is presented with them. Each category has its own awarding body, and this table is the single most examinable part of the chapter.

The rules of the prize

A prize may be shared, but by no more than three persons in one year. Only the Peace Prize may go to an organisation rather than a person; the International Committee of the Red Cross has received it three times and the United Nations refugee agency twice. Since 1974 the statutes have barred a posthumous award, so a prize may not be given to someone already dead when the announcement is made, although a laureate who dies between the announcement and the ceremony still receives it. Each laureate is given a gold medal, a diploma and a sum of money. A prize may be declined: Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Literature Prize in 1964 and Le Duc Tho refused the Peace Prize in 1973, while Boris Pasternak was forced by his government to decline in 1958.

Indian and Indian-origin laureates

Rabindranath Tagore won the Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali and was the first Asian to receive a Nobel Prize of any kind. C. V. Raman won the Physics Prize in 1930 for the scattering of light known as the Raman effect, and remains the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in a science. Mother Teresa received the Peace Prize in 1979 for her work in Kolkata. Amartya Sen received the Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work on welfare economics and famine. Kailash Satyarthi shared the Peace Prize in 2014 with Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan for their work against the exploitation of children; Malala, then seventeen, is the youngest Nobel laureate in any category.

Records and firsts worth carrying

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in Physics in 1903, and the only person to win in two different sciences, adding Chemistry in 1911. Linus Pauling is the only person to have received two unshared prizes, in Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962. Among the laureates connected with India by birth or work are Ronald Ross, who won the Medicine Prize in 1902 for showing how malaria is transmitted, having done that work in India, and Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, who won the Literature Prize in 1907 and remains the youngest winner in that category. Note that Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was C. V. Raman's nephew, a link papers like to test.

How the questions are set

Most questions are direct: the founder, the first year, the number of categories, the awarding body, the city, the Indian winner in a given field. A second kind asks which category a named person won, so keep Tagore with Literature, Raman with Physics, Sen with Economics and Satyarthi with Peace. A third asks about the rules, usually the limit of three sharers or the bar on posthumous awards. Avoid learning the most recent winners as a list, because that changes every October; the founding facts do not.