1. Robert Lucas, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the theory of “rational expectations,” split his $1 million prize with his ex-wife, based on a clause in their divorce settlement from seven years earlier: “Wife shall receive 50 percent of any Nobel Prize.”
2. Physicist Lise Meitner, whose work helped lead to the discovery of nuclear fission, was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Prize 13 times without ever winning.
3. In 2007, two winners had a combined age of 177. At 90, professor Leonid Hurwicz is the oldest person to ever win (one-third of the Prize in Economics); at 87, writer Doris Lessing is the oldest woman (Literature).
4. DNA expert Kary Mullis – 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry – was scheduled to be a defense witness in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. However, Simpson lawyer Barry Scheck felt the prosecution’s DNA case was already essentially destroyed, and he didn’t want Mullis’ personal life to distract jurors (he’d expressed an affinity for LSD).
5. In the last ten years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has gone for the first time to authors in Portugal, China, Trinidad & Tobago, Hungary, Austria and Turkey
6. Nobel Laureates include: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Jimmy Carter, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Pierre & Marie Curie, Max Planck and Albert Einstein.
7. Big names who never won: Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Mangesh Hattikudur, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Paul Tagliabue, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Edison and Mahatma Gandhi.
8. As part of his divorce settlement, Einstein’s Nobel Prize money went to his ex-wife, Mileva Maric.
9. The first Nobel Laureates collected 150,800 Swedish kronor (about $15,420 today). The stakes have been raised. This year’s prize was $1.5 million – shared in the case of multiple winners.
10. The Curie family is a Nobel Prize machine, winning five: Pierre and Marie for Physics in 1901; Marie solo for Chemistry in 1911; daughter Irene and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie for Chemistry in 1935; and Henry Labouisse – Irene’s daughter Eve’s second husband – accepted on behalf of UNICEF in 1965.
11. Alfred Nobel – inventor of dynamite – may have been inspired to create the Nobel Prize after a premature obituary in a French newspaper called him a “merchant of death.”
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