PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: Nobel Prize (all)
Swedish inventor
Alfred Nobel, 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 and...
American physicist
George E. Smith, 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 with...
president of United States
Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States (2009–17) and the first African American to hold the office. Before winning the presidency, Obama represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate (2005–08). He...
prime minister of United Kingdom
Winston Churchill, 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....
German-American physicist
Albert Einstein, 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...
American religious leader and civil-rights activist
Martin Luther King, Jr., 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 fundamental...
president of United States
Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States (1913–21), an American scholar and statesman best remembered for his legislative accomplishments and his high-minded idealism. Wilson led his country...
British economist
F.A. Hayek, 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...
British logician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s...
president of United States
Theodore Roosevelt, 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 government in support of the public...
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T.S. Eliot, 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...
president of United States
Jimmy Carter, 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 perceived inability to deal successfully...
American musician
Bob Dylan, 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...
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw, 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.)...
Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat, 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 groups....
chancellor of Germany
Gustav Stresemann, 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 foreign...
American dramatist
Eugene O’Neill, 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 string...
American author
William Faulkner, 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...
Irish author
Samuel Beckett, 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 Godot...
British physicist
Ernest Rutherford, 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 with...
German physicist and philosopher
Werner Heisenberg, 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 for 1932....
Danish physicist
Niels Bohr, 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 to certain...
German physicist
Max Planck, 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 primarily...
German author
Thomas Mann, 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 for...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway, 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 widely...
Irish author and poet
William Butler Yeats, 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, John Butler...
Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda, 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 son...
French philosopher
Henri Bergson, 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 a master...
French writer
André Gide, 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 Huguenot...
Italian-American physicist
Enrico Fermi, 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,...
president of Soviet Union
Mikhail Gorbachev, 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 country’s...
Tibetan Buddhist monk
14th Dalai Lama, title of the Tibetan Buddhist monk who was the 14th Dalai Lama but the first to become a global figure, largely for his advocacy of Buddhism and of the rights of the people of Tibet. Despite...
German historian, philologist, and legal scholar
Theodor Mommsen, 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 Protestant...
American scientist
Linus Pauling, 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 bond...
Russian author
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 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, 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),...
Italian author
Luigi Pirandello, 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...
German chemist
Wilhelm Ostwald, 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...
American economist
Milton Friedman, 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...
Russian physiologist
Ivan Pavlov, 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...
French author
Albert Camus, 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 in leftist...
Norwegian explorer and scientist
Fridtjof Nansen, 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 (1900,...
Polish-born French physicist
Marie Curie, 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 Nobel...
British writer
Rudyard Kipling, 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 children....
German chemist
Fritz Haber, 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...
British biochemist
Frederick Sanger, 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. He shared...
English physicist
P.A.M. Dirac, 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 and...
American chemist
Irving Langmuir, 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 industrial...
president of South Africa
Nelson Mandela, 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...
Italian physicist
Guglielmo Marconi, 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 Braun....
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