The Nobel Prizes in numbers

How many people have won a Nobel Prize? Who was the oldest winner? How much do they win? Here are some facts and figures about the Nobel Prizes:
• 5 prizes were created by Alfred Nobel in his 1895 will, for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace, which were awarded from 1901. A sixth prize in economics, “in memory of Alfred Nobel,” was created by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
• 6 laureates have declined the prize. The only two to do so of their own will were France’s Jean-Paul Sartre, who turned down the 1964 literature prize, and Vietnam’s peace negotiator Le Duc Tho, who refused to share the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler forbade three German laureates — Richard Kuhn (chemistry 1938), Adolf Butenandt (chemistry 1939) and Gerhard Domagk (medicine 1939) — from accepting the prize, while Soviet authorities forced Boris Pasternak to decline the 1958 literature prize.
• 17 was the age of the youngest laureate to be honored, Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan (Peace 2014). The oldest laureate was Russian-born American Leonid Hurwicz (Economics 2007), who was 90.
• 18 laureates have been affiliated with the two universities claiming the most Nobels: Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.
• 21 years: That’s how long Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi had to wait before she could travel to Oslo to collect the peace prize she was awarded in 1991. Also deprived of their liberty: German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (Peace 1935), who died in 1938 without being allowed to leave his country; and Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (Peace 2010), who died earlier this year after being granted medical parole from prison.
• 28 English-language writers have won the literature prize, ahead of French (14), German (13) and Spanish (11) laureates.
• 48 women have won a Nobel prize, including Marie Curie who won it twice (Physics 1903 and Chemistry 1911). The economics prize, with only one female laureate in 2009, and the physics prize, with only two laureates, remain the most inaccessible prizes for women.
• 49 is the number of times the various juries have decided to not award the prize. The peace prize has had no recipient 19 times, most recently in 1972.
• 50 years must pass before the juries’ top secret deliberations are made public.
• 67 is the average age of the economics prize laureates — the oldest average age across all disciplines. The youngest average age can be found among physics laureates at 55.
• 318 is the tally of nominations for the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. 104 people have received the prize since its creation, and 26 groups or organizations. In 1942, 1943 and 1944, no nominations were accepted.
• 579 is the number of times a Nobel has been awarded, to 911 individuals, between 1901 and 2016. A third of laureates were born in the US. The laureates born in Sweden (29), Norway (12) and Denmark (11) have together won more than those born in Japan (24), China (11) and India (7) together.
• 500 meters of linen tablecloth are placed on the 60 tables at the Nobel gala banquet celebrating the laureates, held each year at Stockholm’s city hall on Dec. 10 in honor of the death of Alfred Nobel.
• 1,350 people are typically invited to the banquet, where 260 waiters serve food on 7,000 pieces of china, along with 5,400 glasses and 10,000 pieces of silver cutlery.
• 9 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million or €940,500) is the sum to be awarded for each Nobel Prize in 2017, to be shared if several laureates are honored in the same discipline. Literature laureates are the ones most likely to take home the whole sum: On 105 occasions, there has been just one literature winner.
• 4.2 billion kronor: The value of the assets managed by the Nobel Foundation at the end of 2016.