The Nobel Prizes are five annual awards created by Alfred Nobel's 1895 will, in physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace, first given in 1901. A sixth economics prize was added in 1968 by Sweden's central bank. The 2026 laureates are announced 5 to 12 October 2026. Below are 30 Nobel Prize trivia questions with verified answers.

The Nobel Prizes attract more confidently repeated falsehoods than almost any other subject in science history, partly because the rules are genuinely odd and partly because the good stories are better than the true ones. Where a claim is popular and wrong, the answers below say so, and the last section collects six of them in one place.

None of these 30 questions repeat the ones in the Nobel Prize & Great Discoveries Trivia Quiz, so you can play both without meeting the same answer twice.

Round 1: Alfred Nobel and how the prizes work

1. When did Alfred Nobel sign the will that created the prizes, and how much did he leave? 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris. The document was short, handwritten and drafted without a lawyer, and it left the bulk of his estate, usually given as about 94 percent, in a fund whose interest would pay the prizes. His relatives contested it and the institutions named in it had not agreed to take part, which is why the first prizes were not awarded until 1901, five years after his death.

2. Why is one Nobel Prize awarded in a different country from the rest? Because the will says so. Nobel specified that the peace prize should be decided by a committee chosen by the Norwegian Parliament, while the others went to Swedish institutions. Norway and Sweden were in a union at the time, which dissolved in 1905, and the arrangement outlived it. The peace prize is still announced and presented in Oslo, the rest in Stockholm, both on 10 December.

3. Why is there no Nobel Prize in mathematics? Not because a mathematician had an affair with Alfred Nobel's wife. Nobel never married, and no version of that story has any evidence behind it. The plainer explanation is that Nobel's will funded work of practical benefit to humankind and he had little interest in abstract mathematics. A Scandinavian mathematics prize endowed by King Oscar II already existed at the time, so the field was not unrecognised.

4. Is the Nobel Prize in Economics a real Nobel Prize? Not strictly. Its full name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Sweden's central bank created it in 1968 to mark its 300th anniversary and first awarded it in 1969. The bank funds it, not Nobel's estate, and it is not mentioned in his will. It is announced and presented alongside the other prizes, which is why the distinction is so widely missed.

5. How many people can share a single Nobel Prize? Three at most. The Nobel Foundation statutes state that in no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons. The rule is increasingly awkward in physics, where the results being honoured often come from collaborations of hundreds or thousands. Organisations can win the peace prize, but the science prizes can only go to individuals.

6. How long are Nobel nomination records kept secret? Fifty years. The statutes forbid disclosing nominations publicly or privately for half a century. This matters more than it sounds: any claim that a living person has been nominated for a Nobel Prize comes from the nominator, never from the committee, and thousands of academics, past laureates and parliamentarians are eligible to nominate. A nomination is not a shortlisting and cannot be confirmed.

7. Can a Nobel Prize be awarded posthumously? Not since 1974, unless the laureate dies after the announcement. Before the rule changed it happened twice, to Erik Axel Karlfeldt for literature in 1931 and Dag Hammarskjold for peace in 1961. In 2011 the medicine laureate Ralph Steinman turned out to have died three days before the announcement, which the Nobel Assembly had not known. The Nobel Foundation board ruled that he remained a laureate.

8. What is a Nobel medal made of, and what is the prize worth? Since 1980 the medals have been struck in 18 carat recycled gold with a 24 carat plating. Earlier Swedish medals were 23 carat, weighed around 200 grams and measured 66 millimetres across. The cash award currently stands at 11 million Swedish kronor for a full prize, divided if the prize is shared.

Round 2: Records, repeats and refusals

9. Who is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes? Linus Pauling, chemistry in 1954 for his work on the chemical bond and peace in 1962 for campaigning against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Four other people have won twice, but all of them shared at least one of their prizes.

10. Who has won two Nobel Prizes in the same category? Two people. John Bardeen won physics in 1956 for the transistor and again in 1972 for the theory of superconductivity developed with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer. Frederick Sanger won chemistry in 1958 for working out the structure of insulin and again in 1980 for methods of sequencing DNA.

11. Which family holds the most Nobel Prizes? The Curies, with five. Marie Curie won two, Pierre Curie shared the 1903 physics prize, their daughter Irene Joliot-Curie shared the 1935 chemistry prize with her husband Frederic, and Henry Labouisse, married to their other daughter Eve, accepted the 1965 peace prize as executive director of UNICEF.

12. Which organisation has won the Nobel Peace Prize the most times? The International Committee of the Red Cross, three times, in 1917, 1944 and 1963, the last of those shared with the League of Red Cross Societies. Its founder Henry Dunant shared the very first peace prize in 1901. The UN refugee agency UNHCR has won twice, in 1954 and 1981.

13. Who is the youngest Nobel laureate of all time? Malala Yousafzai, who was 17 when she shared the 2014 peace prize with Kailash Satyarthi. The record for the science prizes is much older and belongs to a physicist, which the companion quiz covers.

14. Who has turned down a Nobel Prize? Two people declined voluntarily. Jean-Paul Sartre refused the 1964 literature prize because he refused all official honours on principle, and Le Duc Tho refused the 1973 peace prize, awarded jointly with Henry Kissinger for the Vietnam accords, on the grounds that peace had not actually been established. He remains the only person to decline the peace prize. Boris Pasternak accepted the 1958 literature prize and then declined it under Soviet pressure, and three German scientists were barred from accepting by Hitler's government.

15. Who is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize? Andre Geim. He took the 2000 Ig Nobel for levitating a live frog in a magnetic field, then the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics with Konstantin Novoselov for isolating graphene, famously using adhesive tape to peel single atomic layers off graphite.

16. How many times has a Nobel Prize simply not been awarded? Forty-nine times since 1901. Most of the gaps fall in the two world wars, when the statutes allowed a prize to be withheld if no work in a category was judged to meet the standard, and the money returned to the fund. The peace prize accounts for the largest share of them.

Round 3: The omissions and the mistakes

17. Who is the most conspicuous person never to receive the Nobel Peace Prize? Mahatma Gandhi. He was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and again a few days before his assassination in January 1948. In 1948 the committee gave no peace prize at all, recording that there was no suitable living candidate. In 2006 Geir Lundestad, then secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, called it the greatest omission in the prize's history.

18. Which Nobel Prize was awarded for a procedure now regarded as a medical disaster? The 1949 medicine prize, half of which went to Antonio Egas Moniz for developing the prefrontal leucotomy. Tens of thousands of lobotomies followed before antipsychotic drugs and mounting evidence of severe permanent harm ended the practice. Campaigns to revoke the award have gone nowhere, because there is no mechanism to withdraw a Nobel Prize.

19. Which Nobel-winning discovery turned out to be wrong? The 1926 medicine prize to Johannes Fibiger, for demonstrating that a nematode worm he named Spiroptera carcinoma caused cancer in rats. Later work showed the tumours were driven by vitamin A deficiency in the animals' diet rather than the parasite. The prize stands.

20. What is the longest gap between a discovery and its Nobel Prize? Fifty-five years. In 1911 Peyton Rous showed that a filterable agent, now called the Rous sarcoma virus, could transmit cancer between chickens. The idea that a virus could cause cancer was dismissed for decades. He received the medicine prize in 1966, at the age of 87.

21. Whose pulsar discovery is the most argued-about Nobel omission in physics? Jocelyn Bell Burnell's. As a doctoral student in 1967 she spotted the regular pulse in her chart recordings that turned out to be the first known radio pulsar. The 1974 physics prize went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. In 2018 she was given a special Breakthrough Prize worth 3 million dollars and donated the entire sum to fund physics doctorates for under-represented students.

22. How did two Nobel medals survive the Nazi occupation of Denmark? They were dissolved. In 1940 the chemist George de Hevesy put the medals of Max von Laue and James Franck into aqua regia at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, because exporting gold out of Germany was illegal and both medals were engraved with their owners' names. The orange solution sat on a shelf through the occupation. After the war the gold was precipitated back out and the medals recast. De Hevesy won the chemistry prize himself in 1943.

23. Which Nobel Prize was postponed in the twenty-first century, and why? Literature, in 2018, after a sexual assault and financial scandal engulfed the Swedish Academy. No literature prize was given that year and two were announced in 2019, to Olga Tokarczuk for 2018 and Peter Handke for 2019. The previous postponement of the literature prize had been in 1943.

If you want to test the wider science-history material rather than the prize itself, Famous Inventions Through History covers who actually invented what, and Science Myths: True or False? works the same debunking angle as the table further down this page.

Round 4: The 2025 laureates and the 2026 dates

24. Who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, recognised for her work promoting democratic rights in Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

25. What was the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for? John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis shared it for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit. In plain terms, they showed that a circuit big enough to hold in your hand can behave according to quantum rules, which is the foundation the superconducting qubits in today's quantum computers are built on.

26. What was the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded for? Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi shared it for developing metal-organic frameworks, crystalline materials built from metal nodes joined by organic linkers into structures riddled with regular pores. A gram of some of them has an internal surface area comparable to a football pitch, which is why they are being applied to pulling drinking water out of desert air and capturing carbon dioxide.

27. What was the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded for? Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi shared it for discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance, the mechanism that stops the immune system from attacking the body it lives in. Their work identified regulatory T cells and the gene that governs them, which reframed how autoimmune disease and transplant rejection are understood.

28. Who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature? Laszlo Krasznahorkai, cited for a compelling and visionary body of work that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art. He is the second Hungarian writer to win the literature prize, after Imre Kertesz in 2002.

29. Who won the 2025 economics prize? Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, for explaining innovation-driven economic growth. Mokyr was recognised for identifying the historical preconditions that let technological progress become self-sustaining, and Aghion and Howitt for the theory of growth through creative destruction.

30. When are the 2026 Nobel Prizes announced? Between 5 and 12 October 2026. Physiology or medicine comes first on Monday 5 October, physics on Tuesday 6 October, chemistry on Wednesday 7 October, literature on Thursday 8 October, peace on Friday 9 October in Oslo, and economic sciences on Monday 12 October. The award ceremonies follow on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Six Nobel Prize claims that are false

Each of these turns up in otherwise careful writing. None of them survives a check against the record.

How to check a Nobel Prize claim before you repeat it

Three habits catch most of it. First, check whether the claim involves a category that exists: a Nobel Prize in mathematics, engineering, biology or computing does not, so an award in any of those is something else. Second, treat "nominated for a Nobel Prize" as unverifiable by default, because the fifty-year seal means it is. Third, when a story explains an institution through one dramatic incident, be suspicious of the incident. The obituary that supposedly created the prizes, like the affair that supposedly killed the maths prize, is a narrative that arrived long after the fact.

For a broader run at the same territory, Space & Planets Trivia covers the astronomy end of the discoveries above, and Hard History Trivia Challenge drops the multiple choice safety net entirely.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there no Nobel Prize in mathematics?

Not because a mathematician had an affair with Alfred Nobel's wife. Nobel never married, and no version of that story has any evidence behind it. The plainer explanation is that Nobel's will funded work of practical benefit to humankind and he had little interest in abstract mathematics. A Scandinavian mathematics prize endowed by King Oscar II already existed at the time, so the field was not unrecognised.

Is the Nobel Prize in Economics a real Nobel Prize?

Not strictly. Its full name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Sweden's central bank created it in 1968 to mark its 300th anniversary and first awarded it in 1969. The bank funds it, not Nobel's estate, and it is not mentioned in his will. It is announced and presented alongside the other prizes, which is why the distinction is so widely missed.

Can a Nobel Prize be awarded posthumously?

Not since 1974, unless the laureate dies after the announcement. Before the rule changed it happened twice, to Erik Axel Karlfeldt for literature in 1931 and Dag Hammarskjold for peace in 1961. In 2011 the medicine laureate Ralph Steinman turned out to have died three days before the announcement, which the Nobel Assembly had not known. The Nobel Foundation board ruled that he remained a laureate.

Who has won the most Nobel Prizes?

Five people have won two, and Linus Pauling is the only one to win two unshared prizes, chemistry in 1954 and peace in 1962. John Bardeen won physics twice and Frederick Sanger won chemistry twice. Among organisations the International Committee of the Red Cross leads with three Peace Prizes, in 1917, 1944 and 1963. The Curie family holds five prizes between them.

Did Einstein win the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity?

No. His 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for his services to theoretical physics and specifically for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Relativity was still contested when the committee decided, and the citation deliberately avoided it. The photoelectric work was foundational to quantum theory, so the prize was not a consolation, but the relativity attribution is wrong.

When will the 2026 Nobel Prizes be announced?

Between 5 and 12 October 2026. Physiology or medicine comes first on Monday 5 October, physics on Tuesday 6 October, chemistry on Wednesday 7 October, literature on Thursday 8 October, peace on Friday 9 October in Oslo, and economic sciences on Monday 12 October. The award ceremonies follow on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.