Patterns in
Nobel Nomination

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has made the nomination information from 1901 to 1966 publicly available. Although we cannot have more recent data, we can still find interesting stories about the mysterious Nobel nominations from decades ago. To enable a better comparison, for now, we will mainly look at a few people from the physics domain.

Nominee and Nominator

“Nominee and nominator” signals two opposing relationships. Person A could be a nominator and a nominee at the same time. We can look at A had nominated whom and who had nominated A. With the visualization below, we can notice that people nominate each other, some for multiple times. While this arc diagram is limited when we want to know whether the nominator carries a prize already, whether the nominee wins a prize in the end and the specific nomination pattern. We are certainly curious about how people were connected through the Nobel nomination. To achieve this, we designed a set of “encoding language” to present information about the nomination.

The Encodings

The representation of nomination is complicated. It is observed that some nominators could nominate multiple people across prize categories within a single year. One nominator could propose no more than three people to divide the prize. Some people’s nomination included multiple choices. It is also very often that people receive their Nobel prizes one year later. This happened to 3/5 of the people we are going to examine in the following contents.

We decide to use a triangle as the main visual mark in this visualization. Although it is an abstract geometric as well, the triangle could imply directions, which could be a metaphor for the action of nomination — including “nominated by others” and “nominating others”. An unfilled-style could signal nomination. A filled-style could imply the final result (win a prize or not). Half of the triangle means a division of the nomination. By this encoding language, we can get a quick understanding of the patterns of how a person nominated others and was nominated by others.

All He Had Nominated Finally Won

In 1905, Einstein produced four papers that revolutionized science. These four articles contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, mass, and energy. His discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect was a pivotal step in the development of the quantum theory and eventually won him the Nobel Prize of 1921.

Wilhelm Ostwald was the first and only person who nominated Einstein in 1910. Emil Warburg was a friend of Einstein, and he nominated Einstein continuously for six years.

Albert Einstein received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1922. That was because, during the selection process in 1921, the Nobel Committee for Physics decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation's statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year. Therefore Einstein received his Nobel Prize for 1921 one year later, in 1922. That explains why he got the largest number of nominations in 1922. Also, we can see that in 1919, Planck and Einstein nominated each other. A similar situation applied to Planck as well, he got the prize of 1918 one year later in 1919. Most of the nominations by Einstein was proposed after he won a prize. He had nominated 11 people, among which all of them finally won a prize, either a half one or a full one.

He Almost Won A Prize

The German theorist Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated more than any others, 84 times, yet never won the prize. As Ashley Smart wrote, “the knock against Sommerfeld was that he had no single, great achievement that the committee could point to, even though his collective body of work stacked up to those of contemporaries who won the prize.”

Plate was the most faithful supporter of Sommerfeld. He nominated Sommerfeld for 13 years, which is the longest record in the existing database. Planck nominated him for seven times as well. Sommerfeld nominated Planck in 1918, in which year Planck won a prize. Though Sommerfeld himself never won, the branches of his academic tree are weighted with Nobel gold: Four of his graduate students (Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debye, Wolfgang Pauli, Hans Albrecht Bethe, Werner Karl Heisenberg), and at least two of his students’ students (Felix Bloch, J. Hans D. Jensen), went on to become laureates. The nomination seemed to stop in 1940, and continued in 1948 again. The nominations that went on for 35 years proved that his achievement should not be judged by simply not winning a prize.

The Most Enthusiastic Nominator

In 1925, Franck got half of a physics prize for his contribution in discovering “the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom.” Like all other laureates, he received a standing invitation to nominate colleagues for future prizes. For almost every year of half of his life, he submitted a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Over a 36-year span, he submitted 42 nominations for the Nobel prize — more than any other nominator through 1966.

The visualization above shows an evidently distinct pattern from Einstein and Sommerfeld. Franck won a prize one year later in 1926, the fourth year that he was ever nominated. The majority of the canvas indicates his nomination for others. He had nominated Sommerfeld as well, from 1929 to 1933, and in 1950. The pattern generally shows that he nominated a lot and nominated insistently — nominated the same person twice, three times, four times…up to 10 times, which is quite different from Einstein. Einstein almost never nominated the same person again.

Also, he liked to test different combinations of nominees when nominations rejected by the Nobel committee. He nominated Stern for 10 times — firstly for a half prize then full prize, then half prize again. In 1940, he somehow even nominated Stern twice but still failed. Four years later, Stern finally received a Nobel for the discovery of the proton’s magnetic moment and for work with molecular beams.

First Woman To Win And Win Twice

Marie Curie is a significant figure in the sense that she was the first woman to win a Nobel and she won twice, one for physics, one for chemistry. She got the physics prize quite early, in 1903, the third year of the establishment of Nobel Prize. The Curies were a very successful ‘Nobel Prize family’. Marie Curie's husband and daughter were also prizewinners.

Max K Planck

Max K. Planck was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. He won the Nobel in 1918 for his discovery of energy quanta.

The nomination pattern is quite dense for Planck as well. He was nominated for 74 times in all and nominated for 41 times, including physics and chemistry Nobels. We can read from the pattern that, he liked to vote for certain combinations insistently. He voted quite steadily from 1925 to 1937, one for chemistry and one for physics. For a single person, Lise Meitner, he had tried to nominate her for half chemistry prize for six years, then he nominated her for a physics full prize. While in the end, Lise Meitner did not win a prize.

Some Other Prizes

As a reference, we can look at two more examples from other prize categories.

In 1964, Martin Luther King got the first nomination from American Friends Service Committee, which was an earlier Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Colin Bell was probably the representative of the organization at that time. His second nomination was from 8 members of the Swedish Parliament. Four of them were social democrats and four were liberal politicians.

Althought not indicated in the existing archive which dates from 1901 to 1966, we know that Yasunari Kawabata was the winner of the Nobel literature prize 1968. Yasunari got one vote each year from 1961 to 1966. Among the nominations, Henry Olsson and Harry Martinson nominated him twice each. It is reasonable to believe that Yasunari got nominations in 1967 and 1968 as well, and probably more than one vote.

References

Data source: Nobel Nomination Archive
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, D3.js
Picture credits: The official website of the Nobel Prize and Wikipedia
Related academic paper: Wattenberg M. Arc diagrams: Visualizing structure in strings[C]//Information Visualization, 2002. INFOVIS 2002. IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2002: 110-116.

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