Nobel on the Net

@RANDOM

Tell people you're researching the Nobel Prize "" given to humankind's finest minds in honour of their creativity, intelligence and contributions to the greater good of humanity, etc "" and here's what they want to know.

"Is it true that there was no Nobel Prize for mathematics because Alfred Nobel was upset that his wife was having an affair with a mathematician?"

The good folks at the esteemed Urban Legends Reference Pages at Snopes.com say probably not, but it would be nice to believe the myth!

http://www.snopes.com/science/nobel.htm :
Alfred Nobel as an Urban Legend

In the infancy of the Net, the best resource on the Nobel Prize and its laureates used to be the Nobel Prize Internet Archive, which had a wildly speculative chat section. I revisited it after years, though, and found it looking sadly dated, with clunky frames and far too many ads.

Some years ago, the Nobel Prize Foundation created the Nobel e-Museum, one of the best sources online for Nobel Prize information. It contains the biography, bibliography, acceptance speech and citation for every laureate, with extensive external links wherever possible.

It also has charmingly useless factoids (Gunter Grass was at the dentist when he got The Call, there are only 33 women laureates in the entire history of the Nobel, most of them in Peace or Literature). Avoid the "educational games" section.

The nuclear weapons game takes you to a tedious set of questions on the Limited Test Ban Treaty; and when you have a choice between exploring chemical polymers and exploring Lara Croft or World of Warcraft, guess which one wins?

http://almaz.com/nobel/ : The Nobel Prize Internet Archive "" the original still has lots of information...

http://nobelprize.org/ : ...but the Nobel Foundation's own site is miles ahead.

Writer Tim Parks, here in India on a brief visit, was dismissive of the Nobel Prize in Literature "" how could we believe that "a bunch of Swedish academicians" were best qualified to choose the world's greatest writers?

The Swedish Academy site offers information on academy members and the process by which the Literature award is decided, with great seriousness: "When the Academy reconvenes after the summer holidays, the members must have done their homework."

Some of the greatest controversies in Nobel history, though, have revolved around the Science and Peace prizes.

Wiki has a special page devoted to Nobel spats "" if you want to find out which Nobel laureate was a sperm donor for a controversial "best genes" project, or why the Nobel Prize in Physics could have accommodated three more women laureates (Lise Meitner, Chien-Shiung Wu and Jocelyn Bell), this has the best gossip.

www.swedishacademy.org : The ones who get to anoint the Nobel Literature laureate""very few Academy members born after the 1950s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies : The messy side of the Prize's history

Alfred Nobel's estate was more than 31 million Swedish Kronor when he died, and is worth SEK 1,500 million today. How does the Foundation administer the funds?

Irwin Abrams has an interesting article on the Nobel's early financial history; Norwatch has a pugilistic article on Nobel Foundation investments in defence and genetics companies. None of this deters punters willing to bet on the Nobel-Ladbrokes, Centrebet, the Online Betting Guide and others offer opportunities to make a quick buck off the prize.

http://www.norwatch.no/index.php?artikkelid=1439&back=1 : How murky is the Nobel Foundation's investment history?

http://www.irwinabrams.com/articles/will.html : The Implementing of Alfred Nobel's Will

Be sure to catch the IgNobel awards, announced this week for the dumbest contributions to humanity. I loved the 2005 IgNobel for Literature, bestowed on "Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for... introducing readers to a cast of rich characters "" General Sani Abacha, Mrs Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq, and others".

http://www.improbable.com : IgNobel, in a Nobel cause