The typical Nobel winner is a 61-year-old American man affiliated with Harvard

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phew, almost three decades left! no time to waste; i’ll shave just before the ceremony. does anyone know the address for Harvard’s Future Nobel Laureate department?

Aren’t all the Serious Beard Dudes concentrated in mathematics, computer science, and philosophy?

I seem to recall that voting includes prior winners, so there is some bias in the selection. I also thought that Stanford had the highest number of winners, but I must be mistaken?

The BBC accounting here is including the humanities awards, too. And, for that, they use where the winner has their degree from. So it’s possible Stanford has the most awards given to scientists on faculty.

You’re right - was just looking into this and Harvard appears to be very strong regardless of metric:

This is pretty fun, but given that Nobel laureates are typically recognized decades after their discoveries, wouldn’t it be more useful to analyze their life factors over the period in which they were actually doing their prize-winning work?

I’m particularly interested to see how the ‘marriage’ statistics compare…

My first thought was that, given some very prominent women (Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison) who’ve won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as quite a few non-American, non-European authors (Gao Xingjian, V.S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka) the results would be more balanced.

But, no, looking at the graph it appears that even the Literature prize is heavily slanted toward white men, with Europeans edging out Americans.

How is Murakami looking? He is 64 (61), Born in Winter (Spring), Male (Male), Japanese (American), Waseda University (Harvard), Married (Married), No Glasses (No Glasses), Clean Shaven (Clean Shaven).

Call that five out of eight, figuring his age is close enough. Could call it six out of eight if you considered him American, which isn’t a stretch when you look at his tastes and sensibilities.

Hope he gets it.

Isn’t it also true that Nobel winners eat more chocolate? I think I read twice as much as the average human. Hopefully, for me, this will make up for dropping out and not accomplishing anything.

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