PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: Nobel Prize (all)

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Alfred Nobel
Swedish inventor
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who invented dynamite and other more powerful explosives and who also founded the Nobel Prizes. Alfred Nobel was the fourth son of Immanuel...
CCD
American physicist
George E. Smith is an American physicist who was awarded, with physicist Willard Boyle, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009 for their invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD). They shared the prize...
Barack Obama
44th president of the United States
44th president of the United StatesBarack Obama is the 44th president of the United States (2009–17) and the first African American to hold the office. Before winning the presidency, Obama represented...
Winston Churchill
prime minister of United Kingdom
Winston Churchill was a British statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister (1940–45, 1951–55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory....
Albert Einstein
German-American physicist
Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein...
Martin Luther King, Jr.
American religious leader and civil-rights activist
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was...
Woodrow Wilson
28th president of the United States
28th president of the United StatesWoodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States (1913–21), an American scholar and statesman best remembered for his legislative accomplishments and his high-minded...
F.A. Hayek
British economist
F.A. Hayek was an Austrian-born British economist noted for his criticisms of the Keynesian welfare state and of totalitarian socialism. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with Swedish economist...
Bertrand Russell
British logician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, a founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950....
Theodore Roosevelt
26th president of the United States
26th president of the United StatesTheodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States (1901–09) and a writer, naturalist, and soldier. He expanded the powers of the presidency and of the federal...
T.S. Eliot
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised...
Jimmy Carter
39th president of the United States
39th president of the United StatesJimmy Carter is the 39th president of the United States (1977–81), who served as the country’s chief executive during a time of serious problems at home and abroad. His...
Bob Dylan
American musician
Bob Dylan is an American folksinger who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with the intellectualism...
George Bernard Shaw
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
Yasser Arafat
Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat was the president (1996–2004) of the Palestinian Authority (PA), chairman (1969–2004) of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and leader of Fatah, the largest of the constituent PLO...
Gustav Stresemann
chancellor of Germany
Gustav Stresemann was the chancellor (1923) and foreign minister (1923, 1924–29) of the Weimar Republic, largely responsible for restoring Germany’s international status after World War I. With French...
Eugene O'Neill
American dramatist
Eugene O’Neill was a foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long...
William Faulkner
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
Samuel Beckett
Irish author
Samuel Beckett was an author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays, especially En attendant...
Ernest Rutherford
British physicist
Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British physicist considered the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). Rutherford was the central figure in the study of radioactivity, and...
Werner Heisenberg
German physicist and philosopher
Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist and philosopher who discovered (1925) a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics...
Neils Bohr
Danish physicist
Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who is generally regarded as one of the foremost physicists of the 20th century. He was the first to apply the quantum concept, which restricts the energy of a system...
Max Planck
German physicist
Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests...
Thomas Mann
German author
Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize...
Ernest Hemingway
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and...
William Butler Yeats, c. 1915.
Irish author and poet
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats’s father,...
Pablo Neruda
Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He is perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century. Neruda was the...
Henri Bergson
French philosopher
Henri Bergson was a French philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in favour of values of motion, change, and evolution. He was also...
André Gide, oil painting by P.A. Laurens, 1924; in the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris.
French writer
André Gide was a French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide was the only child of Paul Gide and his wife, Juliette Rondeaux. His father was of southern...
Enrico Fermi
Italian-American physicist
Enrico Fermi was an Italian-born American scientist who was one of the chief architects of the nuclear age. He developed the mathematical statistics required to clarify a large class of subatomic phenomena,...
Mikhail Gorbachev
president of Soviet Union
Mikhail Gorbachev was a Soviet official, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet Union in 1990–91. His efforts to democratize his...
14th Dalai Lama
Tibetan Buddhist monk
14th Dalai Lama is the title of the Tibetan Buddhist monk Tenzin Gyatso, the first Dalai Lama to become a global figure, largely for his advocacy of Buddhism and of the rights of the people of Tibet. Despite...
Theodor Mommsen.
German historian, philologist, and legal scholar
Theodor Mommsen was a German historian and writer, famous for his masterpiece, Römische Geschichte (The History of Rome). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. Mommsen was the son of a...
Linus Pauling
American scientist
Linus Pauling was an American theoretical physical chemist who became the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes. His first prize (1954) was awarded for research into the nature of the chemical...
Pasternak
Russian author
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet whose novel Doctor Zhivago helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour....
president of Colombia
Juan Manuel Santos is a Colombian politician who cofounded (2005) the Social Party of National Unity (Partido Social de Unidad Nacional, or Partido de la U), later served as president of Colombia (2010–18),...
Luigi Pirandello
Italian author
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi...
Wilhelm Ostwald.
German chemist
Wilhelm Ostwald was a Russian-German chemist and philosopher who was instrumental in establishing physical chemistry as an acknowledged branch of chemistry. He was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize for Chemistry...
Milton Friedman
American economist
Milton Friedman was an American economist and educator, one of the leading proponents of monetarism in the second half of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976. (Read Milton...
Ivan Pavlov
Russian physiologist
Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex. In a now-classic experiment, he trained a hungry dog to salivate at the sound of a metronome...
Albert Camus
French author
Albert Camus was a French novelist, essayist, and playwright, best known for such novels as L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger), La Peste (1947; The Plague), and La Chute (1956; The Fall) and for his work...
Nansen, Fridtjof
Norwegian explorer and scientist
Fridtjof Nansen was a Norwegian explorer, oceanographer, statesman, and humanitarian who led a number of expeditions to the Arctic (1888, 1893, 1895–96) and oceanographic expeditions in the North Atlantic...
Marie Curie
Polish-born French physicist
Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903...
Rudyard Kipling
British writer
Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for...
Haber
German chemist
Fritz Haber was a German physical chemist and winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his successful work on nitrogen fixation. The Haber-Bosch process combined nitrogen and hydrogen to form ammonia...
Sanger, Frederick
British biochemist
Frederick Sanger was an English biochemist who was twice the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He was awarded the prize in 1958 for his determination of the structure of the insulin molecule....
P.A.M. Dirac
English physicist
P.A.M. Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Dirac is most famous for his 1928 relativistic quantum theory of the electron...
Langmuir, Irving
American chemist
Irving Langmuir was an American physical chemist who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry.” He was the second American and the first...
Nelson Mandela
president of South Africa
Nelson Mandela was a Black nationalist and the first Black president of South Africa (1994–99). His negotiations in the early 1990s with South African Pres. F.W. de Klerk helped end the country’s apartheid...
Guglielmo Marconi
Italian physicist
Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian physicist and inventor of a successful wireless telegraph, or radio (1896). In 1909 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics, which he shared with German physicist Ferdinand...