Several fields of human cultural and scientific development are not included in the list of Nobel Prizes, because they are neither among the prizes established as part of Alfred Nobel's will nor, in the case of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sponsored afterwards by the Nobel Foundation. While the foundation has discouraged (and occasionally taken legal action against) individuals and organizations that have used the Nobel name to refer to prizes not meeting the aforementioned criteria, [1] several prominent individuals and organizations have nonetheless used the label "Nobel Prize of X" to refer to highly prestigious awards in fields of activity not covered by the official Nobel Prizes. These awards are listed below.
Alfred Nobel's last will of 1895 only included five prizes, covering outstanding achievements who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in the fields of chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. The original Nobel prizes thus includes:
In addition to the prizes listed above, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is sponsored by the Nobel Foundation. The foundation has trademarked the term "Nobel Prize" and this designation cannot be legally used to refer to any prizes other than the five original Nobels. [1]
Several prizes in fields of study and achievement not covered by the original Nobel Prizes have been established by various entities. Some have been referred to as the "Nobel Prize of" that particular field, in the vast majority of cases without the approval of the Nobel Foundation. These prizes are generally the highest awards in their fields. For some fields, more than one prestigious prizes are listed below. Some most important prizes in the world are presented in bold. The distinguished prizes not conferred by the Nobel Foundation include (with the year when a prize was first awarded in brackets):
See also ICIAM Prizes (1999), [10] William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics (2010). [11] [12]
See also Crafoord Prize in Mathematics (1982), Maryam Mirzakhani Prize in Mathematics (1988), Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics (1993), Leroy P. Steele Prize (1993), Clay Research Award (1999), Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences (2004), Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2013).
See also ACM Prize in Computing (2007) to distinguished early to mid-career computer scientists, Milner Award (2012) exclusively to European researchers.
There are two other technology awards also sometimes referred to as a "Nobel":
See also King Faisal Prize (1982), Heineken Prizes (1989), Shaw Prize (2004), BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards (2008), Breakthrough Prize (2013), Tang Prize (2014), etc.
There are two other environmental awards often referred to as a "Nobel":
See also 'Arts' below.
See also 'Architecture' and 'Nobel Prize in Literature' above, and 'Design', 'Music', and 'Photography' below.
See also 'Arts' above.
See the section on Geosciences, Agricultural Sciences and Environmental Sciences awards above for prizes focused exclusively on physical geography.
See also 'Prizes sponsored by the Nobel Foundation' above.
See also 'Arts' above.
See 'Arts' above.
See 'Arts' above.
See 'Arts' above.
The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years. The name of the award honours the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields.
Robert Cox Merton is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the method to determine the value of derivatives.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is one of the royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special responsibility for promoting natural sciences and mathematics and strengthening their influence in society, whilst endeavouring to promote the exchange of ideas between various disciplines.
The Kyoto Prize is Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences. It is given not only to those that are top representatives of their own respective fields, but to "those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind". The Kyoto Prize was created in collaboration with the Nobel Foundation and is regarded by many as Japan's version of the Nobel Prize, representing one of the most prestigious awards available in fields that are not traditionally honored with a Nobel.
The Crafoord Prize is an annual science prize established in 1980 by Holger Crafoord, a Swedish industrialist, and his wife Anna-Greta Crafoord. The Prize is awarded jointly by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Crafoord Foundation in Lund, with the former selecting the laureates. The prize is awarded in four categories: mathematics and astronomy, geosciences, biosciences and polyarthritis, the disease from which Holger severely suffered in his later years.
Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov was a Soviet, Russian and American theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the field of condensed matter physics. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Vitaly Ginzburg and Anthony James Leggett, for theories about how matter can behave at extremely low temperatures.
The Japan Prize is awarded to individuals whose original and outstanding achievements in science and technology are recognized as having advanced the frontiers of knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity for mankind. As of 2024, the Japan Prize has been awarded to 111 people from more than ten countries.
Eli Yablonovitch is an American physicist and engineer who, along with Sajeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. In addition to pioneering photonic crystals, he was the first to recognize that a strained quantum-well laser has a significantly reduced threshold current compared to its unstrained counterpart. This is now employed in the majority of semiconductor lasers fabricated throughout the world. His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.
The Rutherford Medal is the most prestigious award offered by the Royal Society of New Zealand, consisting of a medal and prize of $100,000. It is awarded at the request of the New Zealand Government to recognize exceptional contributions to the advancement and promotion of public awareness, knowledge and understanding in addition to eminent research or technological practice by a person or group in any field of science, mathematics, social science, or technology. It is funded by the New Zealand government and awarded annually.
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP equations, the exact solution of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation describing dynamic scaling of growing interfaces, and the study of whirling flocks of birds. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe for groundbreaking contributions to theory of complex systems, in particular "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".
Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is an American chemist and Nobel laureate, known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with living systems. Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they affect diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19. At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Isamu Akasaki was a Japanese engineer and physicist, specializing in the field of semiconductor technology and Nobel Prize laureate, best known for inventing the bright gallium nitride (GaN) p-n junction blue LED in 1989 and subsequently the high-brightness GaN blue LED as well.
Yann André LeCun is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
David Jeffery Wineland is an American physicist at the Physical Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His most notable contributions include the laser cooling of trapped ions and the use of ions for quantum-computing operations. He received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Serge Haroche, for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems."
Andrea Alù is an Italian American scientist and engineer, currently Einstein Professor of Physics at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He is known for his contributions to the fields of optics, photonics, plasmonics, and acoustics, most notably in the context of metamaterials and metasurfaces. He has co-authored over 650 journal papers and 35 book chapters, and he holds 11 U.S. patents.
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the Breakthrough Prizes, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Board. Initially named Fundamental Physics Prize, it was founded in July 2012 by Russia-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist Yuri Milner. The prize is awarded to physicists from theoretical, mathematical, or experimental physics that have made transformative contributions to fundamental physics, and specifically for recent advances.
Michelle Yvonne Simmons is an Australian quantum physicist, recognised for her foundational contributions to the field of atomic electronics.
Jun Ye is a Chinese-American physicist at JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the University of Colorado Boulder, working primarily in the field of atomic, molecular, and optical physics.
On November 13, 2014, ACM announced the funding level for the ACM A.M. Turing Award is now $1 million. Google Inc. will provide all funding for this award, recognized as the highest honor in computer science and often referred to as the field's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
it was in recognition of work that clearly was of Nobel laureate stature
The Nobel equivalent for Information Theory is the Claude E. Shannon Award
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ignored (help)Many of the prizes serve as precursors to a Nobel or fill in areas where a Nobel is unlikely to be awarded ...