The Nobel Family

The Nobel Prize is the highest accolade in academia. Who are the winners? What made them into what they are? This paper sheds partial light on that last question, mapping the academic ancestry of Nobelists. There are 727 Nobel laureates. There are 25 family trees with a single Nobelist, 4 trees with 2 Nobelists, and 1 tree with 696 Nobelists. This is a remarkable agglomeration of excellence.

The clustering of Nobel Prize winners has been documented before (Zuckerman, 1996; Chan and Torgler, 2015b), but not in terms of academic genealogy. The only comparable effort is limited to the winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Tol, 2022b). The current paper extends that family tree to the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine or physiology. (The prizes for literature and peace are of an entirely different nature.) This allows me to analyze the differences between the four disciplines in terms of their respective concentration of Nobelists and their openness to other disciplines.

A family tree shows more than just clustering. It allows for the identification of key figures in research training as revealed by the number of and closeness to Nobel descendants. Nobel laureates undoubtedly have an innate talent for research and have had excellent education; arguably, mentoring at the final stages of formal education and the first stages of independent research helped to realize that potential. Part of what made them what they are is that they learned from the best. The research below also distinguishes Nobelists who are insiders from those who are not. The paper further uses a newly defined measure of crosscloseness (Tol, 2023) to identify Nobelists who studied with other Nobelists.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 discusses the data and methods. Section 3 shows the results for Nobel descendants, ancestors, and peers, as well as differences between disciplines and changes over time. Section 4 concludes.