Nobel Prizes, 1901 to / Age at the moment of the award
Physics laureates used to be in their 40s. Since 2001 the median is 72.
Every Nobel Prize awarded to a person, 982 in all, plotted by the winner's age on award day. The prize is not for the young any more, but the trend differs sharply by field. Make a guess, then see.
Your guess first
55
Every laureate, one dot each
Tap or hover near a dot to see who it is. The thick line is the median age in 15-year windows.
Median age by field and era
Darker means older. Under-40 share in brackets. Tap a row to load it in the chart.
What this shows, and what it cannot
Peace laureates actually got younger, and Literature laureates aged by only about nine years. The three science prizes are where the ageing is steepest: by the 2000s fewer than one laureate in twenty in Physics was under 40, against more than one in four in 1901 to 1950. The data show the age at the award, not the age at the discovery. Many prizes now honour work that took decades to be confirmed, which fits the pattern but is not measured here.
Sources and method
Nobel Prize Outreach, Nobel Prize API v2.1, laureates endpoint: api.nobelprize.org/2.1/laureates. Opened and downloaded on 28 October 2026.
Age is our own calculation: date of the award minus the laureate's birth date, in years. When the API gave no exact award date, 1 October of the award year is used.
Counted: prizes to individuals with a known birth date (982 prizes). Excluded: 51 prizes to organisations. A person who won twice counts twice. The Economics prize is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel, first awarded in 1969.
The latest year in the data is ; some 2026 categories may be incomplete at the time of the download.