Category Famous Nobel Laureates

          Ragnar Frisch was a Norwegian economist, and joint winner of the very first Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Jan Tinbergen, for his research in econometrics.

          Frisch was born in Oslo on 3rd March 1895, as the son of a gold smith. He began his career as a gold and silver smith apprentice in order to work in the family business. He later became interested in economics, and studied the subject at Royal Frederick University.

          After graduating in 1919, he studied economics and mathematics abroad for several years. He received his Ph.D in mathematical statistics from the University of Oslo in 1926.

          In 1969, Ragnar Frisch, along with Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, received the Nobel Prize for economics for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.

          Frisch coined the term ‘econometrics’ for studies in which he used statistical methods to describe economic systems. In 1933, he presented the first mathematical economic model that could describe fluctuations in the business cycle. He died in 1973.

          The Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz was born on 31st March 1914, in Mexico City into a prominent family with ties to Mexico’s political, cultural, and military elite. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

          Under the encouragement of Pablo Neruda, Paz began his poetic career in his teens. In 1933, he published his first book of poems, ‘Luna Silvestre’.

          A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of beyond the borders works during his lifetime, many of which have been translated into other languages.

          In 1962, he was named Mexico’s ambassador to India. Paz completed several works, including ‘O Mono Gramatico’ and ‘Ladera Este’, while in India.

          He even wrote an essay ‘In Light of India’, which was based on a lecture given at the invitation of Rajiv Gandhi in 1985.Through this work; he established how similar India and Mexico are. He died on 19th April, 1998.

          The famous French novelist and critic Claude Simon’s major novels include ‘The Wind’, ‘The Grass’, and ‘The Flanders Road’. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985.

          Claude Simon was born on 10th October 1913 in Madagascar. The son of a cavalry officer who was killed in World War I, Simon was raised by his mother in Perpignan, France. After secondary school at College Stanislas in Paris, and brief sojourns at Oxford and Cambridge, he took courses in painting at the Andre Lhote Academy. He then travelled extensively through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece. Later, he fought in World War II, and later earned a living producing wine.

          Simon is often identified with the French literary movement that emerged during the 1950s. War is a constant and central theme of most of his works. The University of East Anglia awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1973. Claude Simon died on 6th July, 2005, France.

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          Sir William Golding was born on September 19th, 1911. He won the Nobel Prize for literature for his parables of the human condition in 1983. He attracted a cult of followers, especially among the youth of the post-World War II generation.

          Golding’s first published novel was ‘Lord of the Flies’, the story of a group of schoolboys isolated on a coral island who revert to savagery.

          ‘The Inheritors’, set in the last days of Neanderthal man, is another story of the essential violence and depravity of human nature.

          He was also awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel ‘Rites of Passage’, the first book in what became his sea trilogy, ‘To the Ends of the Earth’.

          His later works include ‘Close Quarters’, ‘The Hot Gates’, ‘The Brass Butterfly’, ‘A Moving Target’, and ‘Fire Down Below’.

          William Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Golding died on 19th June, 1993 in England.

          Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Latin American writer who gained worldwide readership with his brand of ‘magical realism’. He illuminated the unique style of conventional storytelling with vivid fantasy.

          Marquez was born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, in Colombia. He is indisputably one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

          He was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature. Garcia Marquez began his career as a journalist, and became a renowned one too.

          Marquez was just 19-years-old when his first novel ‘Leaf Storm’ was published. His most famous works are ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, ‘The Autumn of the Patriarch’, and ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’. Among them, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, is considered as a masterpiece of magical realism.

          He died on 17th April, 2014 in Mexico.

          Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto in the town of Parral in Southern Chile on 12th July 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. Neruda was the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century. He won Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1971.

          His mother Rosa Basoalto died within two month of Neruda’s birth. His father always discouraged him from writing. This became the main reason why the young poet began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda.

          In 1923, he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, ‘Book of Twilight’. When he was just 20-years-old, his poetry collection ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’ made him a household name in Latin America.

          In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honouring poets with diplomatic assignments. He served as Ambassador to France.

          He died on 23rd September 1973.

          Samuel Beckett was a renowned Irish author, critic, playwright, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English. He was born on a Good Friday on 13th April 1906, in Ireland.

          In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. During World War II, Beckett was living in Paris. He joined the underground movement, and fought for the resistance until 1942. He was forced to flee with his French-born wife to the unoccupied zone. In 1945, after the liberation, he began his most prolific period as a writer.

          He authored ‘Eleutheria’, ‘Waiting for Godot’, ‘Endgame’, the novels ‘Molloy’, ‘Malone Dies’, ‘The Unnameable’, and ‘Mercier and Camier’, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism. His experiences during World War II – insecurity, exile, hunger – came to shape his writing.

          In his most famous work, ‘Waiting for Godot’, he examines the most basic foundations of our lives with strikingly dark humour. Beckett died on 22nd December, 1989.

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          The Nobel Prize in Literature 1958 was awarded to Boris Pasternak for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the Great Russian epic tradition.

          Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10th February, 1890. His father was an artist and professor, and his mother was a concert pianist.

          Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ helped him win the Nobel Prize. He accepted the prize initially, but he was forced by the authorities of his country to decline the prize. Later,   his descendants were to accept it in his name in 1988.

          His most important works are ‘Twin in the Clouds’, ‘Over the Barriers’, ‘On Early Trains’, ‘Poems’, ‘Themes and Variations’, ‘Safe Conduct’, ‘Second Birth’, and ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Pasternak’s translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderon de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.

          Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as the author of ‘Doctor Zhivago’.

          Boris Pasternak died on 30th May, 1960.

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          Albert Camus was a French-Algerian playwright, novelist, and Nobel laureate. Camus was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature.

          Camus was born on 7th November 1913, in French Algeria. He studied at the University of Algiers.

          While living in occupied France during World War II, he became active in the Resistance movement. He was a very active theatre producer and playwright.

          By mid-century, he became a renowned writer, and had a worldwide readership. His three most important novels are ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Plague’, and ‘The Fall’. He authored two book-length philosophical essays ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, and ‘The Rebel’, which received much appreciation too. He was often credited as being a proponent of existentialism.

          He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 for his literary production, which illuminates the problems of the human conscience. Camus died on 4th January 1960, in a car accident.

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            William Faulkner was a major American writer of the twentieth century. His imaginative power, and the psychological depth of his works, ranks him as one of America’s greatest novelists. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to modern American literature.

            He joined the Canadian, and later, the British, Royal Air Force during the First World War. During the early 1920s, Faulkner wrote poetry and fiction. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories.

            Though Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally, he was relatively unknown until he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

            William Faulkner received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1950. Faulkner donated his Nobel winnings, to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers, eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Faulkner died of heart attack on 6th July 1962, at the age of 64.

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          As a philosopher, mathematician, educator, social critic and political activist, Bertrand Russell authored over 70 books and thousands of essays and letters. Bertrand Russell was born at Trellech on 18th May 1872 in the United Kingdom.

          Russell was a prominent anti-war activist and he championed anti-imperialism. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

          Born into the British aristocracy, and educated at Cambridge University, Russell gave away much of his inherited wealth. Instead of being sent to school in childhood, he was taught by governesses and tutors. In 1890 he went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge.

          His first books were ‘German Social Democracy’, ‘An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry’, and ‘A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz’.

          He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He was active as a politician and social critic until his death. Bertrand Russell died on 2nd February, 1970.

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          T.S. Eliot, American-English author, was one of the most significant English poets of the twentieth century.

          He was born in Missouri on 26th September 1888. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25. In 1927, at the age of 39, he became a British citizen, renouncing his American citizenship.

          Eliot’s writing style dealt with the bad feelings that World War I had created in European and American societies. It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in ‘Poetry’ in 1915.

          Some of his other major works are ‘The Wasteland’, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘Ash Wednesday’, and ‘Four Quartets’. He was also known for his seven plays, particularly ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, and ‘The Cocktail Party’. Among all his works, Eliot considered ‘Four Quartets’, his best. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his outstanding contribution to poetry”. He died in London on 4th January 1965.

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          Hermann Karl Hesse is a German poet and novelist. Hesse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

          His best-known works include ‘Demian’, ‘Steppenwolf’, ‘Siddhartha’ and ‘The Glass Bead Game’. His works basically depicted the spirit and nature-the mind and the body.

          Hesse was born on 2nd July 1877, in Germany. His grandfather Hermann Gundert developed the current grammar in Malayalam language, compiled a Malayalam-English dictionary, and also contributed to the work in translating the Bible to Malayalam.

          After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1946, Hermann Hesse did not contribute much to literature. Hesse’s works did not receive much acclaim till his death. It’s only after his death that the world started appreciating his works.

          Hermann Hesse died on 9th August, 1962, at the age of eighty-five.

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          Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. He was born on 16th October, 1888, in New York City. He was the son of Mary Quinlan and the romantic actor James O’Neill. Eugene spent the first seven years of his life touring with his  father’s theatre company.

          He began to write plays in 1913. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including ‘Beyond the Horizon’, ‘Anna Christie’, ‘Strange Interlude’, ‘Ah! Wilderness, ‘Desire Under the Elms’, and ‘The Iceman Cometh’.

          The drama ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ is often numbered on the short list of the finest American plays in the 20th century.

          O’Neill’s plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular, and involve characters on the fringes of society.

          O’Neill’s final years were spent estranged from much of the literary community and his family. Though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936, most of his later works were not produced until after his death. He died on 27th November, 1953.

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          Otto Hahn was a German chemist and researcher. He pioneered the fields of radio-chemistry and radioactivity, and is known as ‘the father of nuclear chemistry’. He inadvertently discovered nuclear fission during an experiment in which the uranium atom split into barium.

          Otto Hahn was born on 8th March 1879, in Germany. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery and the radiochemical proof of nuclear fission. Hahn crusaded against the use of nuclear weapons after World War II.

          Otto Hahn received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1945. During the selection process in 1944, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry decided that none of the year’s nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Otto Hahn therefore, received his Nobel Prize for 1944 one year later, in 1945.

          Though Hahn is best known for his discovery of nuclear fission, he also made several other important scientific contributions in the fields of chemistry and physics. He died on 28th July, 1968.

            Peter Debye was one of the leading physical chemists of his time, whose studies in the field of molecular structure helped mankind in developing greater understanding of the subject.

          Debye was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. He was born on 24th March, 1884. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich in 1908.

          In 1912, Peter Debye developed a method to discern how a molecule is arranged in a structure to determine how electrical charges are distributed. This became important in the mapping of molecular structures.

          At the same time, X-ray radiation was becoming an important tool for mapping crystalline structures, but Peter Debye also developed methods for using both X-rays and electron beams to map molecular structures in gases, for example. Peter Debye was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936. The world saw the last of this eminent scientist on 2nd November 1966, when he succumbed to a heart attack.

            Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie discovered artificial radioactivity- synthesising radioactive elements in the laboratory. Such elements are now used in tens of millions of medical procedures every year. Their use has saved mil-lions of lives.

            Irene Joliot-Curie was born in Paris as the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie. Irene worked with her mother to provide mobile X-ray units during World War I.

            She later worked at the institute that her parents had founded. It was there that she conducted her Nobel Prize awarded work. This made the Curies- the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.

            The Joliot-Curies missed winning the Nobel twice earlier, for the couple had found proof of the neutron, the missing component of atomic nuclei, as well as the positron, the electron’s anti-particle counterpart, thus proving the existence of anti-matter. However, they failed to recognise the significance of their discoveries.

            Irene Joliot-Curie died on 17th March 1956. Frederic died two years after Irene’s death.

             Frederic Joliot-Curie was a French physicist and Nobel laureate, who, along with his wife Irene Joliot-Curie, is credited with the discovery of artificial radioactivity. Frederic was born in France on 19th March, 1900. In 1925, he became an assistant to Marie Curie, at the Radium Institute and later got married to Curie’s  daughter Irene Curie.

            In 1934, the husband and wife duo discovered artificial radioactivity. The discovery was a milestone in science. For the same, they bombarded boron, aluminium, and magnesium with alpha particles. On bombardment, they obtained radioactive isotopes of elements not ordinarily radioactive. Since these elements were not found naturally, they decomposed easily, emitting positive and negative electrons. In 1935, for their discovery of artificial radioactivity, Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

            It was after the discovery of the artificially produced isotopes that the possibility of using them to follow chemical changes and physiological processes were realized. Frederic Joliot-Curie died on 14th August 1958.

          Hans Fischer was a famous German organic chemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in the structure of heme, the red blood pigment, and chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants.

          Hans Fischer was born on 27th July 1881, in Germany. Fischer studied haemoglobin, which is composed of the protein globin, and what is called the heme group. Haemoglobin possesses the unique property of forming a loose reversible combination with oxygen, so that oxygen taken up by it in the lungs can be given off in the tissues. In this loose combination the active part is heme, and heme combined with any other protein except globin, does not possess the property of giving up combined oxygen.

          Fischer mapped the composition of the heme group and in 1929; he succeeded in artificially producing the substance.

          He also studied other pigmented substances of biological importance, including chlorophyll, which plays a crucial role in plant photosynthesis. Hans Fischer died on 31st March, 1945.

          Fritz Haber was a German physical chemist. He was the winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his successful work on nitrogen fixation.

          Haber was born on 9th December 1868 in Poland. He became known for his Nobel Prize winning invention of the Haber—Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas.

          This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilisers. The food production for half the world’s current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilisers.

          His public life was entangled in controversy because of his role in the German poison gas programme during World War I. His name has been associated with the process of synthesizing ammonia. Haber formulated a theory to explain that exposure to a low concentration of a poisonous gas for a long time often had the same effect as exposure to a high concentration for a short time. This became known as Haber’s rule. He died on 29th January, 1934.

          Otto Wallach was a German chemist born on 27th March, 1847. He received the 1910 Nobel Prize for his work on alicyclic compounds.

          In 1865, he went to the University of Gottingen to study chemistry. In 1889, he was made the Director of the Chemical Institute at Gottingen. For many years, Wallach studied the structure and characters of alicyclic compounds, including hydrogen chloride.

         Wallach spent much of his research on the molecular structure of essential oils. He separated from the oils a group of fragrant materials that he called terpenes. He showed that many substances were mixtures of a small number of terpenes and that terpenes can easily be altered and changes into each other. Otto Wallach’s work became significant within the chemical industry, where essential oils are used in perfume and food.

          In 1909, he published his results and conclusions in his book about the chemistry of Terpenes- ‘Terpene and Campher’.

          Otto Wallach died on 26th February 1931, at the age of 84.

          Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald almost single-handedly established physical chemistry as an acknowledged academic discipline. In 1909, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria, and reaction velocities.

          Ostwald, born on 2nd September 1853, was a German chemist. Ostwald, Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff, and Svante Arrhenius are credited with being the modern founders of the field of physical chemistry.

          Ostwald went to Leipzig in 1887, where he carried out ground-breaking research on catalysis, while promoting the works of Arrhenius and van’t Hoff.

          In 1894, he revealed how a catalyst can affect a chemical reaction’s speed, but is not included in its end-products. This understanding shed great light on chemical reactions, occurring in both industrial processes and living organisms. Ostwald died in 1932, after a short illness. He was 79 years old.

            Sir Robert Robinson studied the chemical reactions involved in forming alkaloids, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1947. He isolated tropinone in 1917, and described the structure of morphine in 1925, and strychnine in 1946.

            Robert Robinson was born on 13th September, 1886 at Rufford in Derbyshire. He contributed greatly towards the definition of the arrangement of atoms within molecules of morphine, papaverine, narcotine etc. These discoveries led to the production of certain antimalarial drugs in future. He also invented the symbol for benzene having a circle in the middle whilst working at St. Andrews University in 1923.

            During the World War II, Robinson worked on topics of national importance such as chemotherapy and chemical defence.

            His closing years were marred by failing eyesight, and he became almost completely blind. Nevertheless, his intellect remained active, and he began an autobiography when he was 88-years-old, working at it even on the day he died, 8th February, 1975.

            Linus Pauling was one of the greatest scientists and humanitarians the world has seen. He was a much respected and beloved defender of civil liberties and health issues.

            Pauling was born on 28th February 1901, in the US. Linus Pauling has been awarded two undivided Nobel Prizes. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Eight years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to weapons of mass destruction.

            He is one of four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize. Of these, he is the only person to be awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of the two legends to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.

            After first studying at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, Linus Pauling earned his Ph.D from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, with which he maintained ties for the rest of his career.

            In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application in the structure of complex substances.

            Linus Pauling died on 19th August 1994.

            Melvin Calvin won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1961 for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants. Through studies during the early 1950s, particularly of single-cell green algae, Calvin traced the path taken by carbon through different stages of photosynthesis, which was later named the Calvin cycle. For this, he made use of tools such as radioactive isotopes and chromatography. His findings included insight into the important role played by phosphorous compounds during the composition of carbohydrates.

            Calvin was born on 8th April 1911, at St. Paul, Minnesota in the US. He is well-known for his leadership quality. During the latter part of the 1940s, and throughout the following decade, he led, and inspired an outstanding group of researchers.

            In 1942, Calvin married Genevieve Jemtegaard, with later Nobel chemistry laureate Glenn T. Seaborg as his best man. The husband and wife duo worked on an interdisciplinary project to investigate the chemical factors in the Rh blood group system. He died on 8th January, 1997.

            Max Ferdinand Perutz was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962, jointly with English biochemist John Kendrew, for their investigation on the structure of haemoglobin.

          Max Perutz was born on 19th May 1914, in Vienna, Austria, where his father owned a textile factory. He took his Ph.D from Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1936.

          Max Perutz applied the most powerful device X-ray crystallography to analyze the structure of haemoglobin. During the 1930s, this method was used to map increasingly large and complex molecules. He began to map the structure of haemoglobin, for example – the protein that allows blood to transport energy-giving oxygen to the body’s muscles.

          He received several awards including the Royal Medal in 1971, and the Copley Medal in 1979 from the Royal Society’ of London.

          On 6th February, 2002, he succumbed to cancer.

        Sully Prudhomme, the French essayist and poet in 1901, had the honour of winning the first Nobel Prize in Literature.

          Born on the 16th March 1839, in Paris, little is recorded about his upbringing, but it is known that he was originally studying engineering but he changed streams and studied philosophy instead. He had already begun writing poetry as a student, and his debut came in 1865.

          Much of his work demonstrated a sometimes sentimental, and certainly personal, style with a heavy leaning towards his interests in philosophy and all things scientific.

          He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect. Sully Prudhomme died in1907.

            Rudyard Kipling was an English writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his poems and stories set in India during the  period  British imperial rule.

            Kipling was born in Bombay, but educated in England. In 1882, aged sixteen, he returned to Lahore, where his parents then lived. He worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers there.

           His literary career began with ‘Departmental Ditties’ published in 1886. His children’s books are classics of children’s literature. Rudyard Kipling wrote the most famous children’s book in world history- ‘The Jungle Book’ in 1894.

          In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.

         His other works are ‘Stalky and Co.’, ‘Kim’ and ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’. The ‘Just So Stories’ were originally written for his daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia aged six.

         Rudyard Kipling died on 18th January, 1936.

          William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 13th June 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats.

          A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped in founding the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years, served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Though his works after 1910 was strongly influenced by Ezra Pound, becoming more modern in its imagery, W. B. Yeats was loyal to the traditional verse forms.

          He won the Nobel Prize in the year 1923 for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation. William Butler Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence.

          His first significant poem was ‘The Island of Statues’, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models.

          His first solo publication was the pamphlet ‘Mosada: A Dramatic Poem’. Yeats died in 1939.

             George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. He was a renowned playwright, critic and polemicist. When Shaw was 15-years-old, his mother left him and his father.

            Later, Shaw’s plays, including ‘Misalliance’, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents.

            He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ‘Widowers’ Houses’, ‘Pygmalion’ and ‘Candida’. George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 1925.

            Over a decade later in 1938 he earned an Academy Award for the film adaptation of ‘Pygmalion’. In the final decade of his life, he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death. Bernard Shaw refused all state honours including the Order of Merit in 1946.

          Bernard Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950.

          Today he is considered as one of the greatest wits of English language. Film adaptations of his plays are considered classics.

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             A chemist and physicist, Ernest Rutherford was the central figure in the study of radioactivity who led the exploration of nuclear physics. Ernest Rutherford was born on 30th August 1871, in New Zealand. He is considered be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday.

               After studying at the Cavendish Laboratory, Rutherford became a professor at McGill University in Canada. Being the first to split the atom, Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of atomic structure. Working with Frederick Soddy, Rutherford advanced the hypothesis that helium gas could be formed from radioactive substances.

               He discovered that radioactive preparations gave rise to the formation of gases. Rutherford had an enormous influence in the field of nuclear physics and mentored scientists, including Chadwick, Niels Bohr, and Otto Hahn. He died on October 19th, 1937.

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               Sir William Ramsay was a Scottish physical chemist who at the end of the 19th century discovered four new elements. These were the noble gases, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon; they added a whole new group to the Periodic Table of the elements.

               William Ramsay was born on 2nd October 1852, and received his basic education in Glasgow before traveling to Germany to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of this achievement.

               The remarkable inertness of the newly found elements resulted in their use for special purposes, for example, helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen for lighter-than-air craft and argon to conserve the filaments in light bulbs.

               Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, he became involved in efforts to secure the participation of scientific experts in the creation of government science policy. He died on 23rd July, 1916.

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            Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was a renowned German chemist of the 19th century, who did pioneering work in the field of organic chemistry. He was born on 9th October 1852, in Germany.

            In 1874, he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg, under Adolph von Baeyer.

            Fischer demonstrated the structure of biological compounds for instance sugars, proteins and purines. He also worked on the organic synthesis of glucose. This work showed that various substances, little known at that time, such as adenine, xanthine, caffeine all belonged to one homogeneous family and could be derived from one another.

            This parent substance, which at first he regarded as being hypothetical, he called purine in 1884, and he synthesized it in 1898.

            In 1902 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on sugar and purine syntheses. Fischer died in Berlin on July 15th, 1919. 

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          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff was the first person to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was a Dutch physicist and organic chemist, who became the first to propose a three-dimensional model for the structure of simple carbon compounds. His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, and chemical thermodynamics.

          He is also widely considered as one of the founders of physical chemistry as the discipline is known today.

          Jacobus Henricus was born in Netherlands, and earned his doctorate in Utrecht in 1874. In 1885, van’t Hoff was appointed as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901. Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff died on 1st March, 1911.

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            Italian physicist Enrico Fermi built the prototype of a nuclear reactor and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Enrico Fermi was born in Rome  on 29th September, 1901.

            Enrico Fermi has been called ‘the architect of the nuclear age’, and ‘the architect of the atomic bomb’. He was one of the very few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally.

            In 1934, Fermi began his most important work with the atom, discovering that nuclear transformation could occur in nearly every element. One of the elements’ atoms he split was uranium. This work led to the discovery of slowing down neutrons, which led to nuclear fission, and the production of new elements beyond the traditional Periodic Table.

            In 1938, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with artificial radioactivity produced by neutrons, and for nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.

            During the last years of his life Fermi occupied himself with the problem of the mysterious origin of cosmic rays. He died in Chicago on 28th November, 1954.

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          The Nobel Prize in Physics 1935 was awarded to James Chadwick for the discovery of the neutron. Chadwick was born in England on 20th October 1891. He attended Manchester High School prior to entering Manchester University in 1908. He graduated with first class honours in 1911.

          When Herbert Becker and Walter Bothe directed alpha particles (helium nuclei) at beryllium in 1930, a strong, penetrating radiation was emitted. One hypothesis was that this could be high-energy electromagnetic radiation.

          In 1932, Chadwick made the fundamental discovery that it actually consisted of a neutral particle about the same mass as a proton, and proved the existence of neutrons. Ernest Rutherford had earlier proposed that such a particle might exist in atomic nuclei.

          He was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1932, and subsequently the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935. James Chadwick died on 24th July, 1974.

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               Erwin Schrodinger is a renowned Austrian physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter, and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which formed the basis of wave mechanics. He formulated the wave equation.

               He was born on 12th August 1887 in Austria. Schrodinger proposed an original interpretation of the physical meaning of the wave function. The Schrodinger equation, which he formulated to describe the quantum state of a system, is his biggest achievement.

               In Niels Bohr’s theory of the atom, electrons absorb and emit radiation of fixed wavelengths when jumping between fixed orbits around a nucleus.

               In 1926, Erwin Schrodinger formulated a wave equation that accurately calculated the energy levels of electrons in atoms.

               Schrodinger died on 4th January, 1961.

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          Paul Dirac was a British theoretical physicist who is particularly known for his attempts to unify the theories of quantum mechanics, and the relativity theory.

          Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on 8th August 1902 in Bristol, England. He became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1932, a post he held for the next 37 years.

          In 1933, he published a pioneering paper on Lagrangian quantum mechanics. The importance of Dirac’s work lies essentially in his famous wave equation, which introduced special relativity into Erwin Schrodinger’s equation. The equation is a mathematical formulation for studying quantum mechanical systems.

          The Nobel Prize in Physics 1933 was awarded jointly to Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

          He was also awarded the Royal Medal in 1939, the Copley Medal, and the Max Planck Medal both in 1952, among other honours, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930 and of the American Physical Society in 1948.

          Dirac died on 20th October 1984, in Florida, US where he is buried.

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               German physicist Gustav Hertz, born on 22nd July 1887 in Hamburg, won the Nobel Prize in 1925, for the Franck-Hertz Experiment conducted in 1914 with James Franck, who shared the Nobel honour.

               Gustav Ludwig Hertz and James Frank established the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom through their ground-breaking experiment.

               After the publication of Niels Bohr’s theory on the structure of the atom, Gustav Hertz and James Franck studied the movements of free electrons in various gases, and the impacts these electrons have on an atom’s functions. They conducted an experiment in 1913 to verify Bohr’s theory. A potential difference was applied to a tube containing a low-pressure gas. The potential difference increased the free electrons’ mobility until, at a certain energy level; they jumped to a higher-energy orbit instead.

               Hertz was a Member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Corresponding Member of the Gottingen Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Gustav Hertz died in 1975 and James Franck in 1964.

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            Niels Bohr was a Nobel prize-winning physicist and   humanitarian who made revolutionary theories on atomic structures.

            Bohr was born on 7th October 1885, in Copenhagen. He earned a doctorate in physics in 1911 from the Copenhagen University. The discoveries of the electron and radioactivity at the end of the 19th century led to different models for the structure of the atom.

            In 1913, Bohr developed his model of atomic structure, known as the Bohr model, which depicts the atom as a small, positively-charged nucleus, surrounded by negatively-charged electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus, similar in structure to the Solar System.

            In 1921, Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute. The element bohrium (Bh) was named after him. Niels Bohr died on 18th November, 1962.

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               Albert Einstein, born on 14th March 1879, in Germany, was one of the most well-known and influential physicists of the 20th century.

               The Nobel Prize awarding institution, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, decided to reserve the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, and therefore awarded no physics prize that year. According to the statutes, a reserved prize can be awarded the year after, and Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for 1921 one year later, in 1922. Einstein was unable to attend the December 10th Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. He presented his Nobel speech on 11th July 1923, in Gothenburg.

               Einstein developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. The second pillar is considered as the quantum theory. Einstein is best known by the general public for his mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc2, which is considered “the world’s most famous equation”.

               He died on 18th April 1955, at Princeton, US.

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          Max Planck was born on 23rd April 1858 in Germany. Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family.

          Planck’s fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of the quantum theory. Planck’s theory, won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. He was elected to foreign membership of the Royal Society in 1926, and was awarded the Society’s Copley Medal in 1928.

          Max Planck led an unfortunate, tragic life after he was 50. In 1909, his first wife, Marie Merck died after 22 years of happy marriage, leaving Planck with two sons and twin daughters. The elder son Karl was killed in 1916. His two daughters Margarete and Emma died during childbirth.

          World War II brought further tragedy. Planck’s house in Berlin was completely destroyed by bombs in 1944. His younger son Erwin died a horrible death. Max Planck died on 4th October 1947.

          In 1948, the German scientific institution the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed as the Max Planck Society, which now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific fields.

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               Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless message over 100 years ago. Marconi became known for his work on long-distance radio transmission, and for his development of Marconi’s law and a radio telegraph system.

               Marconi won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Karl Ferdinand Braun, in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.

               Guglielmo Marconi was born on 25th April 1874 in Bologna, Italy. In 1895, he succeeded in sending wireless signals over a distance of 2.4 kilometres.

               In 1896, Marconi took his apparatus to England, and demonstrated his system successfully in London. He founded the Marconi Telegraph Company in 1899. He established wireless communication between France and England across the English Channel.

               His experiment was significant, as it disproved the dominant belief of the Earth’s curvature affecting transmission. Marconi died on 20th July, 1937.

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               J.J. Thomson was a Nobel Prize winning physicist whose research led to the discovery of electrons. In the 1890s, J.J. Thomson managed to estimate their magnitude by performing experiments with charged particles in gases. In 1897, he showed that cathode rays consist of ‘electrons’ that  conduct electricity.

               Thomson was born on 18th December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, England. In 1894, Thomson began studying cathode rays, which are glowing beams of light that follow an electrical discharge in a high-vacuum tube. Thomson determined that all matter is made up of tiny particles that are much smaller than atoms. He originally called these particles ‘corpuscles’, although they are now called electrons.

               Thomson was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1884, and was its President from 1916-1920. He died at the age of 83, on 30th August 1940.

               His ashes were buried in the Nave of Westminster Abbey, joining other science greats such as Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Ernest Rutherford.

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            Henri Becquerel was born in Paris on 15th December 1852, in a distinguished family of scholars and scientists. He won the Physics Nobel Prize in the year 1903, along with Marie and Pierre Curie.

            He was the first person to discover evidence of radioactivity. He studied how uranium salts are affected by light. By accident, he discovered that uranium salts spontaneously emit a penetrating radiation that can be caught on a photographic plate. Further studies made it clear that this radiation was something new and not X-ray radiation. Thus he discovered a new phenomenon, radioactivity. The term radioactivity was coined by Marie Curie.  

            Becquerel was an esteemed member of the European scientific community. He also belonged to the Accademia dei Lincei and the Royal Academy of Berlin, amongst other scholarly societies. He was named an officer of the French Legion of Honour in 1900.

            Antoine Henri Becquerel died on 25th August, 1908. His work with radioactive materials, leaving him burned and scarred, may have contributed to his death. The SI unit for radioactivity, the Becquerel (Bq), is named after him.

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            Pierre Curie was a French physicist, and one of the pioneers in radioactivity. He and his wife, Marie Curie, along with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, for their research on radiation.

            Pierre was born on 15th May, 1859. He received his early education at home before entering the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne. In his early studies on crystallography, together with his brother Jacques, Pierre discovered piezoelectric effects.

            The marriage of Pierre and Marie Curie resulted in a scientific dynasty. Their children and grandchildren also became noted scientists. Pierre and Marie’s daughter Irene and their son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie were also physicists involved in the study of radioactivity, and each received Nobel prizes for their work as well. The Curies’ other daughter Eve married Henry Richardson Labouisse, Jr., who received a Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF in 1965.

            Pierre was killed in a street accident in Paris on 19th April 1906.

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            Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only person to win the award in two different fields – physics and chemistry. Marie curie is remembered for her discovery of Radium and Polonium, and her huge contribution to the fight against cancer.

            She was born in Warsaw in Poland on 7th November 1867. Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie on 26th July 1895.

            During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals. Later, Marie and her husband Pierre decided to hunt for the new element they suspected might be present in pitchblende.

            By the end of 1898 they announced the discovery of two new chemical elements. The first element they discovered was Polonium, named by Marie to honour her homeland. The second element the couple discovered was Radium, which they named after the Latin word for ray.

            She shared the Nobel Prize with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, the original discoverer of radioactivity.

            Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, of aplastic anaemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research.

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        The German physicist, Wilhelm Röntgen was the first Nobel recipient in Physics. He was awarded Nobel Prize in the year 1901 for his  remarkable achievement in discovering X-rays.

            Born on 27th March 1845, in Germany, Röntgen was the first person to systematically produce and detect electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as X-rays. Röntgen is considered the father of diagnostic radiology.

            To highlight the unknown nature of his discovery, he called them X-rays, though they are still known as Roentgen-rays as well.

            He took the very first picture using X-rays of his wife Anna Bertha’s hand. When she saw her skeleton she exclaimed “I have seen my death!”

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            Malala Yousafzai was born on 12th July 1997, in Mingora in Swat Valley, Pakistan. She grew up witnessing the miserable conditions of girl children in her native village in north-west Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times, banned girls from attending school.

            From 2009, she started blogging for the BBC about her experiences during the Taliban’s growing influence in her native region. As a young girl, Malala Yousafzai defied the Taliban in Pakistan and demanded that girls be allowed to receive an education, which resulted in the Taliban issuing a death threat against her.

            She was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012. She survived, but underwent several surgeries in the UK, where she lives today. In addition to her schooling, she continues her work for the right of girls to education.

            She was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. In 2014, she was nominated again and won, becoming the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was announced as the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Kailash Satyarthi of India.

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            Wangari Maathai was an internationally renowned Kenyan politician and environmental activist. She served as the country’s assistant minister of environment, natural resources, and wildlife. She was born on 1st April 1940, in Neyri in Kenya.

            In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. The movement was initiated to draw attention, and attend to environmental and domestic hardships faced by rural women in Kenya.

            Through the Green Belt Movement Maathai assisted women in planting more than 20 million trees. The Green Belt Movement encouraged the women to work together to plant trees and receive a small monetary token for their work.

            In 2004, Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai died on 25th September 2011.

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