Where Nobel winners get their start (Nature)

Nature covers some work by Jonathan Wai and myself. See here for a broader ranking of US schools, which includes Nobel, Turing, Fields awards and National Academies membership.

Where Nobel winners get their start (Nature)

Undergraduates from small, elite institutions have the best chance of winning a Nobel prize.

There are many ways to rank universities, but one that’s rarely considered is how many of their graduates make extraordinary contributions to society. A new analysis does just that, ranking institutions by the proportion of their undergraduates that go on to win a Nobel prize. [ Note: includes Literature, Economics, Peace, as well as science prizes. ]

Two schools dominate the rankings: École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. These small, elite institutions each admit fewer than 250 undergraduate students per year, yet their per capita production of Nobelists outstrips some larger world-class universities by factors of hundreds.

“This is a way to identify colleges that have a history of producing major impact,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and a co-author of the unpublished study. “It gives us a new way of thinking about and evaluating what makes an undergraduate institution great.”

Wai and Stephen Hsu, a physicist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, examined the 81 institutions worldwide with at least three alumni who have received Nobel prizes in chemistry, physiology or medicine, physics and economics between 1901 and 2015. To meaningfully compare schools, which have widely varying alumni populations, the team divided the number of Nobel laureates at a school by its estimated number of undergraduate alumni.

Top Nobel-producing undergraduate institutions

Rank School                Country               Nobelists per capita (UG alumni)
1 École Normale Supérieure France       0.00135
2 Caltech                               US             0.00067
3 Harvard University            US             0.00032
4 Swarthmore College          US             0.00027
5 Cambridge University       UK             0.00025
6 École Polytechnique          France       0.00025
7 MIT                                   US              0.00025
8 Columbia University         US              0.00021
9 Amherst College               US              0.00019
10 University of Chicago     US              0.00017

Small but mighty

Many of the top Nobel-producing schools are private, and have significant financial resources. Among the more surprising high performers were several very small US liberal-arts colleges, such as Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (ranked at number 4) and Amherst College in Massachusetts (number 9).

“What these smaller schools are doing might serve as important undergraduate models to follow in terms of selection and training,” says Wai, who adds that, although admission to one of the colleges on the list is no guarantee of important achievements later in life, the probability is much higher for these select matriculates.

To gauge trends over time, Wai cut the sample of 870 laureates into 20-year bands. US universities, which now make up almost half of the top 50 list, began to dominate after the Second World War. Whereas French representation in the Nobel ranks has declined over time, top-ranked ENS has remained steady in its output.

Hsu and Wai had previously performed two similar, but broader, analyses of the rate at which US universities produce winners of the Nobel prize, Fields Medal (in mathematics) or Turing Award (in computer science), as well as members of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. These studies produced rankings of US institutions that are similar to the new, global Nobel rankings.

Lessons learned 

Santo Fortunato, a theoretical physicist at Indiana University Bloomington who has researched trends in Nobel prizewinners, deems the analyses “quite interesting”, but cautions that the methodology cannot produce a highly accurate or predictive ranking. “There is a high margin of error due to the low numbers of prominent scholars,” says Fortunato. [ See here for a broader ranking of US schools, which includes Nobel, Turing, Fields awards and National Academies membership. ]

Wai and Hsu agree that there are statistical uncertainties in their rankings, owing to the small number of prizes awarded each year. The two are confident that the ENS and Caltech lead the pack, but statistical fluctuations could change the order of schools placed from third to ninth, Hsu says.

The researchers say that their findings suggest that more attention should be paid to the role that undergraduate institutions have in their graduates’ outstanding accomplishments. They also argue that quantifiable achievements are a better gauge of the quality of universities than factors such as reputation, graduation rate, faculty and financial resources and alumni donations.

Says Wai, “Our findings identify colleges that excel at producing impact.”

Regarding statistical fluctuations, if one takes the data as an estimator of a school-related probability for each graduate to win a Nobel, then at 95 percent confidence level ENS and Caltech are the top two schools, but fluctuations could (for example) change the order among #3 (Harvard) through #9 (Amherst). In other words, we can't be >95 percent confident that Harvard grads have a higher probability than Amherst grads, although the central value of the estimated probability is higher for Harvard.

Regarding ENS and their elitist method of selecting students, see below. Two years of preparation for the entrance exam! Also: Les Grandes Ecoles Chinoises and The Normaliens.

Wikipedia: The school, like its sister grandes écoles the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale d'Administration, is very small in size: its core of students, who are called normaliens, are selected via either a highly competitive exam called a concours (Baccalauréat + 2 years) ... Preparation for the "concours" takes place in preparatory classes which last two years ... Most students come from the prépas at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Lycée Henri-IV, and a few other elite establishments in France. Two hundred normaliens are thus recruited every year ...

Lycee Henri-IV is in the Latin Quarter on the left bank, one of my favorite parts of Paris. The book shops and cafes are filled with serious looking young students. Vive la France! :-)

Where men are men, and giants walk the earth

In this earlier post I advocated for cognitive filtering via study of hard subjects

Thought experiment for physicists: imagine a professor throwing copies of Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics at a group of students with the order, "Work out the last problem in each chapter and hand in your solutions to me on Monday!" I suspect that this exercise produces a highly useful rank ordering within the group, with huge differences in number of correct solutions.

In response, a Caltech friend of mine (Page '87, MIT PhD in Physics) sent this old article from the Caltech News. It describes Professor William Smythe and his infamous course on electromagnetism, which was designed to "weed out weaklings"! The article lists six students who survived Smythe's course and went on to win the Nobel prize in Physics. (Click for larger version.)

Vernon Smith, a "weakling" who deliberately avoided the course, went on to win a Nobel prize in Economics. Smith wrote

The first thing to which one has to adapt is the fact that no matter how high people might sample in the right tail of the distribution for "intelligence," ... that sample is still normally distributed in performing on the materials in the Caltech curriculum.

I remind the reader of the Page House motto: Where men are men, and giants walk the earth :-)

See also Colleges ranked by Nobel, Fields, Turing and National Academies output.

Note added: The article mentions George Trilling, a professor at Berkeley I knew in graduate school. I once wrote an electrodynamics solution set for him, and was surprised that he had the temerity to complain about one of my solutions 8-)

Colleges ranked by Nobel, Fields, Turing and National Academies output

This Quartz article describes Jonathan Wai's research on the rate at which different universities produce alumni who make great contributions to science, technology, medicine, and mathematics. I think the most striking result is the range of outcomes: the top school outperforms good state flagships (R1 universities) by as much as a thousand times. In my opinion the main causative factor is simply filtering by cognitive ability and other personality traits like drive. Psychometrics works!

Quartz: Few individuals will be remembered in history for discovering a new law of nature, revolutionizing a new technology or captivating the world with their ideas. But perhaps these contributions say more about the impact of a university or college than test scores and future earnings. Which universities are most likely to produce individuals with lasting effect on our world?

The US News college rankings emphasize subjective reputation, student retention, selectivity, graduation rate, faculty and financial resources and alumni giving. Recently, other rankings have proliferated, including some based on objective long-term metrics such as individual earning potential. Yet, we know of no evaluations of colleges based on lasting contributions to society. Of course, such contributions are difficult to judge. In the analysis below, we focus primarily on STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine/mathematics) contributions, which are arguably the least subjective to evaluate, and increasingly more valued in today’s workforce.

We examined six groups of exceptional achievers divided into two tiers, looking only at winners who attended college in the US. Our goal is to create a ranking among US colleges, but of course one could broaden the analysis if desired. The first level included all winners of the Nobel Prize (physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, literature, and peace), Fields Medal (mathematics) and the Turing Award (computer science). The second level included individuals elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE) or Institute of Medicine (IOM). The National Academies are representative of the top few thousand individuals in all of STEM.

We then traced each of these individuals back to their undergraduate days, creating two lists to examine whether the same or different schools rose to the top. We wanted to compare results across these two lists to see if findings in the first tier of achievement replicated in the second tier of achievement and to increase sample size to avoid the problem of statistical flukes.

Simply counting up the number of awards likely favors larger schools and alumni populations. We corrected for this by computing a per capita rate of production, dividing the number of winners from a given university by an estimate of the relative size of the alumni population. Specifically, we used the total number of graduates over the period 1966-2013 (an alternative method of estimating base population over 100 to 150 years led to very similar lists). This allowed us to objectively compare newer and smaller schools with older and larger schools.

In order to reduce statistical noise, we eliminated schools with only one or two winners of the Nobel, Fields or Turing prize. This resulted in only 25 schools remaining, which are shown below ...

The vast majority of schools have never produced a winner. #114 Ohio State and #115 Penn State, which have highly ranked research programs in many disciplines, have each produced one winner. Despite being top tier research universities, their per capita rate of production is over 400 times lower than that of the highest ranked school, Caltech. Of course, our ranking doesn’t capture all the ways individuals can impact the world. However, achievements in the Nobel categories, plus math and computer science, are of great importance and have helped shaped the modern world.

As a replication check with a larger sample, we move to the second category of achievement: National Academy of Science, Engineering, or Medicine membership. The National Academies originated in an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Lifetime membership is conferred through a rigorous election process and is considered one of the highest honors a researcher can receive.

The results are strikingly similar across the two lists. If we had included schools with two winners in the Nobel/Fields/Turing list, Haverford, Oberlin, Rice, and Johns Hopkins would have been in the top 25 on both. For comparison, very good research universities such as #394 Arizona State, #396 Florida State and #411 University of Georgia are outperformed by the top school (Caltech) by 600 to 900 times. To give a sense of the full range: the per capita rate of production of top school to bottom school was about 449 to one for the Nobel/Fields/Turing list and 1788 to one for the National Academies list. These lists include only schools that produced at least one winner—the majority of colleges have produced zero.

What causes these drastically different odds ratios across a wide variety of leading schools? The top schools on our lists tend to be private, with significant financial resources. However, the top public university, UC Berkeley, is ranked highly on both lists: #13 on the Nobel/Fields/Turing and #31 on the National Academies. Perhaps surprisingly, many elite liberal arts colleges, even those not focused on STEM education, such as Swarthmore and Amherst, rose to the top. One could argue that the playing field here is fairly even: accomplished students at Ohio State, Penn State, Arizona State, Florida State and University of Georgia, which lag the leaders by factors of hundreds or almost a thousand, are likely to end up at the same highly ranked graduate programs as individuals who attended top schools on our list. It seems reasonable to conclude that large differences in concentration or density of highly able students are at least partly responsible for these differences in outcome.

Sports fans are unlikely to be surprised by our results. Among all college athletes only a few will win professional or world championships. Some collegiate programs undoubtedly produce champions at a rate far in excess of others. It would be uncontroversial to attribute this differential rate of production both to differences in ability of recruited athletes as well as the impact of coaching and preparation during college. Just as Harvard has a far higher percentage of students scoring 1600 on the SAT than most schools and provides advanced courses suited to those individuals, Alabama may have more freshman defensive ends who can run the forty yard dash in under 4.6 seconds, and the coaches who can prepare them for the NFL.

One intriguing result is the strong correlation (r ~ 0.5) between our ranking (over all universities) and the average SAT score of each student population, which suggests that cognitive ability, as measured by standardized tests, likely has something to do with great contributions later in life. By selecting heavily on measurable characteristics such as cognitive ability, an institution obtains a student body with a much higher likelihood of achievement. The identification of ability here is probably not primarily due to “holistic review” by admissions committees: Caltech is famously numbers-driven in its selection (it has the highest SAT/ACT scores), and outperforms the other top schools by a sizeable margin. While admission to one of the colleges on the lists above is no guarantee of important achievements later in life, the probability is much higher for these select matriculants.

We cannot say whether outstanding achievement should be attributed to the personal traits of the individual which unlocked the door to admission, the education and experiences obtained at the school, or benefits from alumni networks and reputation. These are questions worthy of continued investigation. Our findings identify schools that excel at producing impact, and our method introduces a new way of thinking about and evaluating what makes a college or university great. Perhaps college rankings should be less subjective and more focused on objective real world achievements of graduates.

For analogous results in college football, see here, here and here. Four and Five star recruits almost always end up at the powerhouse programs, and they are 100x to 1000x more likely to make it as pros than lightly recruited athletes who are nevertheless offered college scholarships.

Caltech crushes Harvard, MIT, and all the rest

[ See updated version. ]

A few years ago I posted a list of number of Nobel prizes aggregated by undergraduate institution of the winner. A social science researcher who reads this blog got interested in the topic and has compiled much more complete information, which he is preparing to publish.

He reports that the school with the most Nobel + Fields + Turing prizes, normalized to size of (undergraduate) alumni population, is Caltech, which leads both Harvard and MIT (the next highest ranked schools) by a factor of 3 or 4. Caltech beats Michigan by a factor of ~50, and Ohio State (typical of good public flagships) by a factor of ~500!

To obtain a higher statistics measurement of exceptional achievement, he aggregated living members of the National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, and normalized to size of alumni population over the last 100 years or so. Caltech again comes out first, beating both Harvard and MIT by a factor of about 1.5. Caltech beats Yale and Princeton by a factor of ~4, and Stanford by a factor of ~5. Swarthmore and Amherst are the leading liberal arts colleges. (See list below.) Caltech beats very good public universities by factors ~100 and more typical public universities by factors ~1000.

Berkeley is the best public university in both the Nobel+ and National Academies rankings. Berkeley is roughly tied with Stanford in Nobels+ per alum, but behind in academicians per capita.

As you might expect, correlation of rank order in these lists with average SAT score is pretty high. Likelihood ratios of ~500 or 1000 for high end achievement suggest that 1. psychometric scores used in college admissions have significant validity and 2. high end achievement is correlated to unusually high ability: two schools with very different mean SAT have very different population fractions above some threshold, such as +3 SD. For example at Caltech perhaps half the students are above +3 SD in ability, whereas at an average university only 1 in ~500 are at that level, leading to ratios as large as 100 or 1000!

Colleges ranked by per capita production of National Academy (Science, Engineering, Medicine) members:

California Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harvard University
Swarthmore College
Yale University
Princeton University
Amherst College
Stanford University
Oberlin College
Columbia University
Haverford College
Cooper Union
Dartmouth College

See also Annals of Psychometry: IQs of eminent scientists, and Vernon Smith at Caltech.


##########################


Correction! The original post quoted results using an estimate of alumni population derived from recent US News data. However, some schools have changed over time in enrollment, so more precise estimates are required. The lists below use graduation numbers reported to IPEDS from 1966-2013 and probably yield more accurate rankings than what was reported above. The main difference on the Nobel+ list is that the University of Chicago jumps to #3 and MIT falls several notches. On the NAS/NAE/IOM list MIT is #2 and Harvard #3.


Undergraduate Institution | Nobel+ | Bachelor's degrees awarded (1966-2013) | Prize per capita ratio

California Institute of Technology 11 9348 0.001176722

Harvard University 34 81553 0.000416907

University of Chicago 15 37171 0.000403540

Swarthmore College 5 15825 0.000315956

Columbia University 20 68982 0.000289931

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 14 52891 0.000264695

Yale University 13 60107 0.000216281

Amherst College 4 18716 0.000213721

[ For comparison: Penn State and Ohio State ~ 0.0000028 and 0.0000026 ; many schools have zero Nobel+ winners. ]



Undergraduate Institution | NAS+NAE+IOM | Bachelor's degrees awarded (1966-2013) | ratio

California Institute of Technology 78 9348 0.0083440308

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 255 52891 0.0048212361

Harvard University 326 81553 0.0039974005

Swarthmore College 49 15825 0.0030963665

Princeton University 109 50633 0.0021527462

Amherst College 35 18716 0.0018700577

Yale University 112 60107 0.0018633437

University of Chicago 56 37171 0.0015065508

Stanford University 117 79683 0.0014683182

[ For comparison, Arizona State and Florida State  ~ 0.000013 ; University of Georgia ~ 0.000008 ]

Nobels for Higgs and Englert

Congratulations to Peter Higgs and François Englert on their Nobel prize. A bit of background from an earlier post How the Higgs boson became the Higgs boson:

IIRC, I met Peter Higgs in Erice in 1990. He was quite a nice fellow, but the story below by Steve Weinberg illustrates how capricious is the allocation of credit in science.

NYBooks: (Footnote 1) In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. This was because they had all explored the mathematics of symmetry-breaking in general theories with force-carrying particles, though they did not apply it to weak and electromagnetic forces. As known since 1961, a typical consequence of theories of symmetry-breaking is the appearance of new particles, as a sort of debris. A specific particle of this general class was predicted in my 1967 paper; this is the Higgs boson now being sought at the LHC.

As to my responsibility for the name “Higgs boson,” because of a mistake in reading the dates on these three earlier papers, I thought that the earliest was the one by Higgs, so in my 1967 paper I cited Higgs first, and have done so since then. Other physicists apparently have followed my lead. But as Close points out, the earliest paper of the three I cited was actually the one by Robert Brout and François Englert. In extenuation of my mistake, I should note that Higgs and Brout and Englert did their work independently and at about the same time, as also did the third group (Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble). But the name “Higgs boson” seems to have stuck.

[ Note that to Higgs' credit his is the only paper that clearly works out the properties of the excitation now known as the Higgs boson. ]

Jeffrey Goldstone showed (1961) that when rigid ("global") continuous symmetries are spontaneously broken by the vacuum (the vacuum configuration is not invariant under the symmetry), a massless boson necessarily results. This boson is the eponymous Goldstone boson: the particle excitation corresponding to small perturbations of the vacuum state in the direction of the symmetry. The natural next step is to ask what happens if the broken symmetry is a gauge (local) symmetry. This is the problem that Higgs et al. solved. But Goldstone had one of the first cracks at the problem. Indeed, Jeffrey deduced the existence of a massive excitation (i.e., the Higgs boson), but its physical reality was in question -- only apparent in certain "choices of gauge"; gauge theory was not then very well understood. According to legend, Sidney Coleman convinced Goldstone that the boson was only a gauge artifact. For years afterward Goldstone would say that Sidney, despite his obvious brilliance, was, when it really counted, always wrong!

I met Englert for the first time in 2008 at a workshop in Paris on the black hole information problem. Over coffee, he explained to me some mysterious comments 't Hooft had made in his talk. A real gentleman, and still very sharp.

A photo from the summer school in Erice, Sicily 1990. Higgs is in the blue socks and sandals, holding a glass of wine. I'm in a maroon shirt two rows back.

A portrait of Higgs in the physics department of the University of Edinburgh.

Schrodinger Cat Nobels

Serge Haroche and Dave Wineland share the 2012 Nobel Prize for their work in quantum optics / atomic physics. Wineland traps atoms whereas Haroche traps photons. Haroche is a normalien and Wineland was educated at Berkeley and Harvard.

My favorite Haroche experiments are the ones in which he creates macroscopic Schrodinger cat states and watches them decohere. For example, see here and here. I also like Haroche's book Exploring the Quantum.

See also Schrodinger's virus.

Nobel Prizes 2011

I was a bit busy last week, with a visitor, posting a paper, etc. so I didn't get to comment on the Nobel prizes.

The dark energy prize is richly deserved (see slides from a colloquium on dark energy I've given a few times; includes above figure). These guys have discovered where most of the energy in the universe is, and may have determined the ultimate fate of the universe on cosmological scales. I note Saul Perlmutter was awarded 1/2 the prize and the other two guys each received 1/4. This may seem like petty credit splitting, but in this case it is appropriate as Perlmutter's group at LBNL have been working on supernova astronomy for a long time trying to get it to work. (Since when I was a grad student!) Perlmutter attributes the original idea to Luis Alvarez, perhaps the greatest experimentalist of the 20th century.

In finding that the universe is on a path to runaway expansion, you had to find type Ia supernovae, which can act as distance markers. How did you get involved with supernova searching?

I was at the University of California at Berkeley for graduate school. One of the heroes here at Berkeley is Luis Alvarez. The tradition that he started is looking for interesting science no matter where it is and then finding tools to do those things. For example, he invented one of the first steady cams.

One of his protégés was my professor, Richard Muller. There was a project to do a superautomated supernova search that Luis Alvarez had suggested to Rich. They had just done one of the first adaptive-optics experiments.

...

To what do you most attribute your scientific success?

I think the biggest thing is, first of all, being willing to learn things, being willing to pick up a new area, but also just being able to work with other people. Most of these jobs are too big for any one person. You end up trying to find a team of people who are as excited as you are and want to push the technique forward. I'm always struck by the fact that the image of the scientist is as a lone person wearing a lab jacket in the lab by themselves for hours, whereas my sense is that maybe the single most important thing for a scientist, aside from being able to think of good questions, is figuring out good people to work with and enjoying the process of inventing ideas together with other people.

You can add one more Nobel prize to the Berkeley lab collection:




I don't have too much to say about the quasicrystal prize, except that there are several curious aspects (this is mostly second hand stuff I picked up from colleagues): 1. the chemists gave a prize for a physics discovery, and seem to have botched the job: 2. they left out the theorist who was instrumental in convincing people that Shechtman's result was for real (Steinhardt had worked out the theory of quasicrystals out already, and even coined the name!) and 3. Shechtman's group at NIST (where he made the discovery) didn't believe the result and his boss kicked him out!

A Nobel for Barry?

Huh? In a few years he might have actually earned one. This just demonstrates the outright political biases of the Nobel Committee. The Nobel citation reads like this (without actually mentioning GWB): "Bush era bad, Obama good. Hope good."

Note I speak as an Obama supporter!

Will pundits on the left have the guts to point out that the emperor has no clothes? This kind of outcome just reinforces the paranoid fantasies of the far-right: that Obama's Harvard magna is fake, that the World Government has been grooming him for leadership since his student days, that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father, etc.

Speaking more broadly, it seems to me that our obsession with prizes (an offshoot of winner-take-all culture) is unhealthy, and that prizes these days are less and less correlated with actual achievement.

While my faith in the Nobel process is shaken (although commenters have already pointed out the Kissinger prize and of course there is always Modigliani-Miller ;-), my confidence in Obama is not -- he reacted properly.

Mr. Obama said he was "surprised and deeply humbled" by the committee’s decision, ... he said he would accept it as “a call to action.”

“To be honest,” the president said “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”

Someone just pointed out to me that this opens the door for a string theorist to win the physics prize ;-)

Steve Chu, Energy Secretary

Steve Chu, currently director of LBNL, is Obama's pick for Energy Secretary. Thank goodness! Finally a big brain will run the agency that funds our national labs and basic energy research.

Chu won the Nobel prize for his work on laser cooling of trapped atoms. This technique is now a fundamental tool in atomic physics. Chu did his PhD at Berkeley under brilliant experimentalist Eugene Commins (who was still around when I was a grad student). When Chu won the Nobel my mother received several phone calls from well wishers -- "I heard your son the Berkeley PhD won the Nobel Prize in physics!" :-/ (Hsu, Chu, what's the difference?) Sorry ma, don't get your hopes up!

Chu: "I told my boss .... `Guess what? I just trapped an atom.' He said, `Great. What are you going to do with it?' I said, `I don't know, but it's great!'"

Nobel Prize in physics 2008

I've found the awarding of physics Nobel prizes in the last decade or two to be, well, erratic. Probably it was always erratic, but this was not apparent to me as a student, and the particulars of prizes even further past are lost to the mists of time.

Once again, I'm not sure I understand today's selection of Nambu together with Kobayashi and Maskawa. All are deserving theoreticians. K-M generalized the flavor mixing matrix of Cabibbo to 3 flavors and thereby introduced the likely origin of (thus far observed) CP violation.

But what is the justification of the Nambu prize? If it is for spontaneous symmetry breaking shouldn't people like Goldstone, Higgs, Englert, Brout, etc. also share the prize? The citation says

...for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.

If by mechanism they mean the general phenomena of spontaneous symmetry breaking then surely others deserve credit as well. If by mechanism they mean the actual dynamics, then I can only conclude they are giving the prize for the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model? (Which is clearly not deserving of the prize!)

I think a more appropriate choice would have been Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (Cabbibo is still alive) and Nambu-Goldstone + other.

Note added: I take back my comment about Cabibbo. The prize citation for KM is really for CP violation, and Cabibbo played no role in that. Regarding Nambu, the citation focuses on his being the first to discuss spontaneous symmetry breaking in a field theoretic context (not exactly Nobel worthy, in my view), and being the first to guess that the strong interactions exhibit spontaneous symmetry breaking, making an analogy with a conventional superconductor. This analogy is fleshed out in a talk given at Purdue in 1960, one year before Goldstone's scalar model which explicitly realizes what has now become known as a Nambu-Goldstone boson. Probably Nambu was the first person to deeply understand that the strong interaction (QCD) ground state spontaneously breaks axial symmetries -- I suppose that is by itself worthy of the prize.

See this Nobel committee scientific report for more details. Thanks to reader MFA for the pointer!

Nobel data

Some interesting Nobel data found here. The author of the study is a professor of evolutionary psychology in the UK.

To improve the analysis I propose we remove the economics prize and replace it with the Fields Medal, and also normalize the number of winners to the size of the country/institution :-) It seems that US dominance is actually *increasing* (at least over 20 year timescales; perhaps we're past the peak by now). See related posts here.

Note that Stanford + Berkeley (the bay area, not even counting UCSF, which won 3) beats any other country over the last 20 years.

Why there should be more science Nobel Prizes – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions

Charlton BG
Medical Hypotheses 2007; 68: 471-3 – doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2006.11.003

Abstract

The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/ physiology and economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. The prizes exist primarily to honour individuals but also have a very important function in science generally. In particular, the institutions and nations which have educated, nurtured or supported many laureates can be identified as elite in world science. However, the limited range of subjects and a maximum of 12 laureates per year means that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized; and relatively few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different level of quality. I advocate that the Nobel committee should expand the number of Nobel laureates and Prize categories as a service to world science. 1. There is a large surplus of very high quality prize candidates deserving of recognition. 2. There has been a vast expansion of research with a proliferation of major sub-disciplines in the existing categories. 3. Especially, the massive growth of the bio-medical sciences has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in this area. 4. Whole new fields of major science have emerged. I therefore suggest that the maximum of three laureates per year in the categories of physics, chemistry and economics should always be awarded, even when these prizes are for diverse and un-related achievements; that the number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine per year; and two new Prize categories should be introduced to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science. Together, these measures would increase the science laureates from a maximum of 12 to a minimum of 24, and increase their coverage. The Nobel Prize committee should also officially allocate proportionate credit to institutions for each laureate - both in retrospect for past prizes, and in the future.


...Nobel laureates nations and research institutions were measured between 1947-2006 in 20 year segments. The minimum threshold for inclusion was 3 Nobel prizes. Credit was allocated to each laureate's institution and nation of residence at the time of award. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 institutions which won three-plus Nobel prizes in 20 years, the UK has 4, France has 2 and Sweden and USSR 1 each. Four US institutions won 3 or more prizes in all 20 year segments: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and Caltech. The most successful institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by Stanford (9), Columbia and Chicago (7).

Table 1 – Number of Nobel laureates by Nation – twenty year segments from 1947-2006. A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.

Nation - 1947-66 - 1967-86 - 1987-2006

USA -50 - 88 - 126
UK - 20 - 25 - 9
Germany - 8 - 7 - 9
Switzerland - 3 - 7 - 7
Sweden - 3 - 7 - 1
Japan - 2 - 1 - 3
USSR/Russia - 7 - 2 - 2
France - 4 - 3 - 5

Table 2 - Number of United States Nobel laureates by Institution – twenty year segments from 1947-2006. A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.

Institution - 1947-66 - 1967-86 - 1987-2006

USA

Harvard - 9 - 13 - 5
Univ. California Berkeley - 7 - 3 - 4
Stanford - 4 - 5 - 9
Caltech - 4 - 4 - 5
Columbia - 4 - 1 - 7
Rockefeller Inst. & Univ. - 3 - 6 - 3
Chicago - 2 - 4 - 7
Princeton - 1 - 2 - 6
MIT - 1 - 5 - 11
Cornell - 1 - 4 - 2

MIT vs Caltech: Nobel count

[ 2015: Updated information. ]

I learned from the Caltech News alumni magazine that 17 Caltech alumni have won the Nobel prize, versus 25 from MIT. You might think the advantage here goes to MIT, but their student body is 5 times larger! Most people are shocked to learn that Caltech's graduating class is only about 200 students. On a per-capita basis, I believe Caltech produces more science Nobel prizes than any other school. Keep in mind that about half of Caltech undergrads major in engineering or computer science, which are not Nobel-eligible disciplines.

When I was a student we used to joke that MIT stood for "Many Incompetent Technologists" (emphasis on Many) or "Made In Taiwan" :-)

On the other hand, Feynman went there, so it can't be all bad. Actually I have to admit it is probably more fun to be an undergrad at MIT than at Caltech (part of it is that the classes are so much easier :-). When I lived in Cambridge I could see there was a much more lively college scene in Boston than LA. MIT is bigger and has a better male-female ratio and more balanced social life than Caltech. Of course, the climate in Boston isn't as nice.

Before I had twins and startups I used to be involved in Caltech admissions and recruiting -- including calling up admitted students to answer questions and give advice. I was often speaking to students who had been admitted to both Caltech and MIT, and I was always scrupulously fair in describing the pros and cons of the two places.

More Caltech bragging: patents and PhDs.