How the Nobel Prize Works: The Six Prizes, Who Decides Them, and Why

There are six Nobel Prizes — physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economic sciences — and the winners are announced over a few days at the start of October each year. The awards themselves are handed over on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, in Stockholm for five of the prizes and in Oslo for the peace prize. All of it is paid for out of a fund created by the will Nobel signed in 1895, which left the bulk of a dynamite fortune to reward work that had "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".

That is the whole machine in outline. The details are stranger than the outline suggests: one of the six prizes is not a Nobel Prize at all, the nomination papers are sealed for half a century, and a rule written to keep the awards honest now routinely leaves people out. This article walks through how the prizes are decided, who does the deciding, which rules constrain the outcome, and why some of the most famous names in science never received one.

Why the prizes exist

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and industrialist who worked out, in the 1860s, how to make nitroglycerine safe enough to sell. Nitroglycerine is a ferociously unstable liquid explosive; Nobel's answer was to absorb it into a porous mineral powder, producing a solid that could be handled, transported and detonated on command. He patented it in 1867 under the name dynamite, and it made him extremely rich. Mining, tunnelling, quarrying and railway construction were all transformed by it. So, inevitably, was war.

By the time he died in 1896 he held hundreds of patents and controlled factories across Europe. He was also, by most accounts, a solitary man who wrote poetry in English and had a lifelong interest in peace movements.

The story usually told about the origin of the prizes goes like this. In 1888 Nobel's brother Ludvig died in Cannes. A French newspaper confused the two men and published an obituary of the wrong brother, under a headline calling him a merchant of death who had grown rich by finding ways to kill more people faster. Alfred read his own obituary, was appalled at how he would be remembered, and resolved to redirect his fortune towards something better.

It is a good story and it may well be true, but the evidence is thin: no copy of that obituary has ever been produced, and the account only appears in print well after the fact. Treat it as the traditional explanation rather than an established one. What is documented is the will itself, signed in Paris on 27 November 1895, which directed that the bulk of his estate be converted into a fund and the interest distributed annually as prizes. It ran to barely a page and left a great deal unspecified, which is why it took five years of legal argument with his relatives before the Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the first prizes were awarded in 1901.

The six prizes and who awards them

Nobel's will named specific institutions to choose the winners, and those institutions still do the job.

Physics and chemistry are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which convenes a separate Nobel Committee for each field.

Physiology or medicine is awarded by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Stockholm. Note the wording: it is not a "medicine prize" in a narrow clinical sense, and much of what it recognises is basic biology.

Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy, a body of eighteen members founded in 1786 who hold their seats for life.

Peace is the outlier. Nobel assigned it to a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, and it is presented in Oslo rather than Stockholm. Nobel left no explanation for this. The usual reading is that Sweden and Norway were joined in a union at the time, and that he considered the Norwegian parliament less entangled in great-power politics than the Swedish one. The peace prize is also the only one that can be given to an organisation rather than a person, which is why bodies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross appear on the list of laureates.

Economic sciences is the one that is not a Nobel Prize. Its full name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Sweden's central bank established it in 1968 to mark its 300th anniversary, funded it with its own donation to the Nobel Foundation, and it was awarded for the first time in 1969 — more than seventy years after Nobel's death. Nobel never mentioned economics in his will and had no hand in creating it.

The distinction matters because everything else about it is identical: same academy, same procedure, same announcement week, same ceremony. Members of the Nobel family have objected publicly to the association over the years. Both things are true at once — it is a serious international prize, and it is not one of Nobel's.

How winners are chosen

You cannot apply for a Nobel Prize, and you cannot nominate yourself — doing so disqualifies the nomination. The process is closed and runs on a fixed annual cycle.

In the autumn, each committee sends confidential nomination forms to several thousand people who are qualified to nominate in that category. The qualifying groups differ by prize but generally include previous laureates, members of the relevant academies, professors at selected universities, and holders of certain institutional offices. For the peace prize the list also takes in serving members of national governments and parliaments, which is why an unusually wide range of people can be truthfully described as "Nobel-nominated". A nomination is a proposal from one qualified person. It carries no weight on its own.

Completed nominations are due by 31 January. Through the spring and summer the committee reduces what is typically a few hundred names to a working shortlist and commissions detailed reports from outside specialists — for a scientific prize, that means experts assessing whether a claimed discovery has held up, who actually made it, and whether its importance is now clear. Work is often examined decades after it was done, which is deliberate: the committees would rather be slow than wrong.

In September the committee submits a recommendation to its awarding body, which votes in early October. The vote is final: there is no appeal, and no procedure for revoking a prize once given.

Then everything is sealed. Nominations, committee reports, expert opinions and the record of deliberations are kept confidential for fifty years. The fifty-year rule is why we can say with certainty who was nominated in the 1940s but only guess at recent years — and why the annual round of press speculation about front-runners is precisely that.

The rules that shape the outcomes

Three statutory rules do most of the work in determining who ends up on the list, and each has consequences.

No posthumous awards. Since a 1974 change to the Nobel Foundation statutes, a prize cannot be awarded to someone who has already died. The single exception is when a laureate dies between the announcement and the ceremony, in which case the award stands. This produced an awkward case in 2011, when Ralph Steinman was named a laureate in physiology or medicine three days after he had died of pancreatic cancer — news that had not reached the assembly when it voted. The Nobel Foundation's board ruled that because the decision had been taken in good faith, in the belief that he was alive, the award would stand.

A maximum of three laureates per prize. No prize may be divided among more than three people, and the work recognised may not be split across more than two separate achievements.

That cap was reasonable when major discoveries were often made by one person in one laboratory. It sits badly with how physics and biology now work. Results come from collaborations running to hundreds or thousands of researchers, and picking three names out of such a team requires a judgement about credit that the underlying science does not really support — a problem raised sharply by both particle physics and gravitational-wave astronomy. The cap also interacts with the posthumous rule in a way that punishes delay: the longer a committee waits for a result to be confirmed, the likelier it is that someone essential to it has died.

Prizes can be withheld. If no candidate meets the standard, a committee can decline to award in that year and return the money to the fund. This has happened frequently — most often during the two world wars, and most often with the peace prize.

Notable laureates and notable omissions

Marie Curie is the most striking name on the list. She shared the 1903 physics prize with her husband Pierre and with Henri Becquerel for work on radioactivity, and won the chemistry prize outright in 1911 for isolating radium and polonium — still the only person to have won in two different sciences. Her family's record is extraordinary: her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie shared the 1935 chemistry prize with her husband Frédéric, and the 1965 peace prize went to UNICEF, whose director was married to Curie's other daughter.

Linus Pauling holds a distinction no one else does. He won the chemistry prize in 1954 for work on the nature of the chemical bond, and the peace prize for 1962 for his campaign against atmospheric nuclear testing. Both were unshared, which makes him the only person to hold two undivided Nobel Prizes. A handful of others have won twice — John Bardeen in physics, Frederick Sanger in chemistry — but always sharing at least one.

The absences are as revealing as the awards.

Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the peace prize on five occasions, the last of them days before he was assassinated in January 1948. The Norwegian Nobel Committee made no peace award at all that year. Committee members have since written openly about the omission, and a former director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute has described it as the greatest gap in the prize's history.

Rosalind Franklin produced the X-ray diffraction images that made the structure of DNA solvable, most famously the photograph known as Photograph 51. The 1962 prize went to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged 37, and the prize could not have gone to her — a dead scientist was not an eligible candidate even before the 1974 statute change. The separate and more contested question is how her work reached Crick and Watson, and how her contribution was described afterwards.

Lise Meitner worked out, with her nephew Otto Frisch, the physical explanation for nuclear fission, and it was her interpretation that made sense of the chemical results her long-term collaborator Otto Hahn had produced in Berlin. Hahn alone received the chemistry prize for 1944. Meitner, an Austrian of Jewish descent who had fled Germany in 1938, was nominated dozens of times across both physics and chemistry and never won.

Chien-Shiung Wu designed and ran the experiment that overturned the assumption that physical laws are symmetrical under mirror reflection. The 1957 physics prize went to Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who had proposed that parity might be violated; Wu, who showed that it was, was left out.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell detected the regular radio pulses that turned out to be the first known pulsar, as a graduate student in Cambridge. The 1974 physics prize went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. She has consistently declined to treat it as a grievance, pointing out that the work later brought her a range of other honours; when she received a major physics prize in 2018 she gave the entire sum away to fund students from under-represented backgrounds in the field.

None of these omissions came from a single villain. They came from committee judgement, from the three-person cap, from the posthumous rule, and from the assumptions of the period about whose contribution counted as decisive.

The prize money and the medal

Each laureate receives three things: a diploma, a gold medal, and a cash award. Where a prize is shared, the money is divided according to the shares the committee sets — an even split between two, or a half and two quarters, and so on.

The amount changes. The Nobel Foundation pays the prizes out of the returns on Nobel's original endowment, so the sum tracks the fund's performance and has been both cut and raised over the decades. It currently runs to several million Swedish krona per prize. Any figure quoted in a given year is out of date the following year, which is worth remembering when you see one repeated online.

The medals are struck in gold and carry Nobel's profile on the front with his birth and death years in Roman numerals. The reverse differs by awarding institution: the science and literature medals carry a line adapted from Virgil's Aeneid about improving life through the arts discovered, while the peace medal, designed separately, shows three figures joined in a bond above an inscription about peace and the brotherhood of nations. They are substantial objects, roughly the width of a drinks coaster and heavy enough to notice in the hand.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the Nobel Prize work?

Six prizes are awarded each year — physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economic sciences — by committees based in Sweden, except the peace prize, which is decided in Norway. Qualified nominators submit confidential nominations by 31 January, committees spend the year assessing candidates with the help of outside experts, and the winners are announced in the first days of October. The awards are presented on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.

Who decides who wins the Nobel Prize?

Different institutions decide each prize: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for physics, chemistry and economic sciences; the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for physiology or medicine; the Swedish Academy for literature; and a five-member committee elected by the Norwegian parliament for peace. Each body has a working committee that sifts nominations and makes a recommendation, and the full body votes in October. The decision is final and cannot be appealed.

Is there a Nobel Prize for mathematics?

No, and the popular explanation for it is false. The story that Nobel excluded mathematics because his wife had an affair with a mathematician cannot be true, because Nobel never married. The likelier reason is simply that he was an engineer and chemist who wanted to reward practical benefit to humanity, and pure mathematics did not fit that brief; the Fields Medal, awarded every four years, and the Abel Prize, awarded annually since 2003, now serve a similar role in mathematics.

Can the Nobel Prize be awarded after death?

No. Since 1974 the statutes have barred posthumous awards, with one narrow exception: if a laureate dies after the announcement but before the ceremony, the award stands. That exception was stretched slightly in 2011, when Ralph Steinman was named a laureate days after his death, unknown to the assembly that had voted for him, and the foundation let the decision hold because it had been made in good faith.

Where to go next

The Nobel Prize is useful to understand because it shows how institutions convert a vague instruction — reward whatever most benefits humanity — into an annual procedure with deadlines, quorums and a hard cap of three names. The procedure works, mostly. It also builds in particular blind spots, and the list of people it missed is a fair guide to what those blind spots are.

If you want more history in this vein, our 10 fascinating history stories collection is a good place to start, and who invented electricity covers a similar problem of credit: a discovery with too many claimants and no committee to settle it.

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