So far this week, my blogging had a distinctly local slant on Nobel Prizes, so now I want to do something different. Quite a lot of people have noticed how many science prizes this year went to Europeans. Read the excellent treatments by Katherine Sharpe, Abel Pharmboy, Steinn Sigurosson, Chad Orzel and PZ Myers to see the range of ideas and opinions on this.
I want to add just a couple of brief points...
If you look at the list of winners of Nobels for Literature, you will notice that they come from all over the world.
If you look at the Peace Prizes, they are also from all over, though U.S. recepients are quite frequent probably due to the fact that the US, as a country with a huge military which it is quite willing to use, is in the position to affect where and when the wars start and where and when they end. Often those decisions are disastrous, but sometimes they are a force for good and the US leaders behind those decisions deserve the prize.
The science prizes are mainly going to Americans and Europeans. This, in my mind, is not due to inherent superiority of scientists in these places, but due to difficulties facing scientists elsewhere. Especially for disciplines awarded by the Nobel committee - physics, chemistry, biomedical research - there is a necessity for quite a lot of space, money, infrastructure, equipment, state support, national science tradition, institutional memory, network of qualified collaborators and access to literature, none of which is readily available to scientists in developing countries. If the prizes were awarded for mathematics, non-medical areas of biology or archeology, for instance, I bet there would be many more recipients from other places, as at least some areas of such research can be done by individuals with minimal need for support, infrastructure and funds.
Let's start with literature. If your library cannot afford subscriptions to any journals, as just subscription to Science and Nature exceeds entire annual operating budget, your research will be based on 40-year old hand-me-down textbooks, not on last week's cutting-edge papers, thus your research is outdated and perhaps flawed even before you start doing it! Forget Nobel - you are doomed to mediocrity no matter how brilliant you may be. You know my solution to this problem: Open Access.
There are about 180 countries in the world (depends who is counting).
There are three science prizes every year, with potentially a total of nine recepients.
In an ideal world, each country would expect, on average (180/9 = 20) to have a science Nobel laureate once every 20 years. This would not mean that US science has gone down the drain, but that science has really became global as it should be. I can't wait for this to happen.
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Even in your ideal world, aren't some countries smaller than others? A country like say Luxembourg should expect to have a science Nobel laureate much less frequently than one in every 20 years.
You are right, I did not correct for the population-size. I wanted to make it as simple as possible to illustrate my point. In the ideal world, China would have a slight edge, and Andorra a slight handicap compared to other countries. Of course, in the absolutely ideal world, there would be no countries.
If the prizes were awarded for mathematics, non-medical areas of biology or archeology, for instance, I bet there would be many more recipients from other places, as at least some areas of such research can be done by individuals with minimal need for support, infrastructure and funds.
Not in mathematics, despite the fact that it requires much less physical infrastructure. The Fields medals are not quite analogous to Nobel prizes, but they are close enough to make this comparison. Of the 48 prizes awarded (including the one Perelman turned down), I believe only one has gone to a mathematician who was not at the time working in the US or Europe, namely Shigefumi Mori from Japan, and he had spent substantial amounts of time in the US. Since receiving the medal, Shing-Tung Yau has spent a fair amount of time in China but his primary employment remains at Harvard, and Heisuke Hironaka has returned to Japan. Vaughan Jones was born in New Zealand but has always worked in the US, and Terry Tao was born in Australia but has almost always worked in the US. As far as I know, these are the only Fields medalists who were born, studied, or worked outside Europe and the US. (Michael Atiyah is the closest to an exception: he grew up in the Middle East, but he was born, studied, and worked in the UK.) The Abel prize is the closest equivalent to a Nobel prize in mathematics. It is less useful for this sort of comparison, since only six people have won it so far, but all of them have been American or European.
Doing great mathematics doesn't require lots of money, but it does require a really active research community. Without great teachers and mentors, people speaking regularly on cutting-edge research, great colleagues to collaborate with or just bounce ideas off, funding to travel to conferences and invite visitors, etc., it's almost impossible to do world-class research. There are historical examples, like Ramanujan, who started doing great research with relatively little education and no colleagues in India (before there were Fields medals). However, Ramanujan is by far the most dramatic example of this phenomenon, and it is exceedingly rare.
This doesn't mean there isn't a lot of talent in other places. The lucky ones study and work in the US or Europe, and the less lucky one languish in obscurity. The amount of talent being wasted is staggering.
P.S. Open Access publication is a very important step for solving this problem, but (at least in mathematics) it would only go so far. If everyone in the entire world had completely free access to all published mathematics, it would still take generations to raise the world research community to the level present in the US and Europe.
Does size matter? Manchester Grammar School counts two Nobel Laureates among their alumni. Both won for prizes for Chemistry.
It would be interesting to study the case of statisticians. For a while, India produced many statisticians who studied and did their early work in India.
The case of statistics in India is really interesting - does anyone know any sources to read up on it in more detail? It's certainly true that starting in the 50's, India has produced a number of great statisticians. There is also a thriving Indian research community in certain areas of mathematics (representation theory, algebraic geometry, theoretical computer science).
The way countries seem to develop good research communities is by specializing in some subfield (usually because of some great expert and his/her students) and then expanding from there. The biggest difficulty is that things can go astray if the initial subfield does not do well, for example if it is largely played out or becomes unfashionable.