Talk:List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation

There is an ambiguity here which you may not have realized. A professor who is on the faculty of a given university *when* he receives the prize qualifies as both "on faculty before award" and "on faculty after award". Different editors and users may interpret these columns differently, so that one laureate will end up listed in the "before" column at his institution but another will go in the "after" column. It might make more sense (and more work, unfortunately) to have a column for those who left a faculty before winning an award, another for those on the faculty at the time of the award and another for those who joined later.

Another problem is that it seems each laureate is only listed once per institution even though many laureates belong in multiple columns for the same school. To take one example, Eric Kandel (Medicine 2000) earned his B.A. from Harvard and his M.D. from NYU; he then returned to Harvard as a junior faculty member and later left Harvard and returned to NYU as a professor before moving to Columbia permanently in 1974. He thus belongs in two columns for Harvard and two for NYU but is only listed once for each. A more complicated entry (which isn't in place yet) will be Melvin Schwartz (Physics 1988), who earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia and then joined the faculty, but left before winning his Nobel only to return later. He will belong in three columns for Columbia and, under the current format, it will be hard to tell that he was elsewhere when he won his prize. I realize your ground rules say each laureate is to be counted once, but this makes the table much less useful -- someone who wants to see whether more laureates graduated from Caltech or Yale cannot presume that the list of each school's graduates is complete.

Your willingness to count visiting and adjunct professors along with full-timers is admirable, but most of the top schools on your list don't count these folks in their totals or include them in their official lists. I know, for example, that Columbia's count in physics alone would increase by five if visitors were included in its litst. If other schools do count these folks your table is still comparing apples and oranges.

There are some individual errors here (for example, Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey are both in the "before" column at Chicago but belong in the "after" column instead, while Linda Buck is in the "after" column at Harvard where she should be listed as "before"); I have no time to make corrections at the moment but will return to help edit this page later.

PS: May be a uniform way to count this, is to apply each nobel laurete to the university where he/she earned the most Advanced degree. This will simplify the methodology and will allow them to be counted just once. Another way is to use the First degree but since we are talking about Nobels that is overtly simplistic

Please merge List of Nobel laureates associated with University of California, Berkeley into this article (or something similar). --Apoc2400 22:47, 28 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This article is a lot of work and needs some time. The imbalance is not on purpose. But it takes a while to incorporate the 70+ chicago, berkley and other alumni into the database. I hope other users will participate. Assuming that every nobel laureate is affiliated to at least three universities (2 degrees and at least 1 teaching assignment), we`re talking about 2100 names that need to be copied and pasted. We all know what exactly needs to be done. So please don`t complain and give working assignments - participate !!!!

I`ve added some more universities, I believe it`s appropriate to remove the caveat now. But please, there`s a lot of work to do - please join me.

City College of New York is completely left off of this list although they have 10 alumni who are Nobel Laureates.

   * Julius Axelrod - 1970 Nobel laureate in Medicine
   * Kenneth Arrow - 1972 Nobel laureate in Economics
   * Herbert Hauptman - 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry
   * Robert Hofstadter - 1961 Nobel laureate in Economics
   * Jerome Karle - 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry
   * Arthur Kornberg - 1959 Nobel laureate in Medicine
   * Leon M. Lederman - 1988 Nobel laureate in Physics
   * Arno Penzias - 1978 Nobel laureate in Physics
   * Henry Kissinger - 1973 Nobel Prize laureate in Peace
   * Robert J. Aumann - 2005 Nobel laureate in Economics

This does not include any of the others that have been on the faculty at some time.

Kissinger started college at CCNY but transfered to Harvard before 
graduating.  I have no problem with him being counted as a CCNY figure,
and if he is included in the list then so should be Julian Schwinger
(Physics 1965) who started at CCNY and then transferred to Columbia.

LA Times University Nobel list dated October 10 2005

For comparison, here is the Los Angeles Times' list of Nobel prize winners claimed by universities.

It is from an article entitled "A Nobel Prize for Creativity", which is about the expansive ways universities try to claim Nobels. the article is here but I don't know how stable that link is. Notably, the Harvard and Berkley counts are much lower (those universities apparently less expansive in their claims then Chicago). In a strict count which avoids short-term research visits and the like, Cambridge would still be the highest and by a greater margin, given that 70 of their Nobels were undergrad or grad students.

LA TIMES LIST:

The universities claiming the largest number of Nobel Prizes*

1. Cambridge University, England: 81

2. University of Chicago: 78

3. Columbia University: 73

4. MIT: 60

5. Oxford University, England: 47

6. Harvard University: 42

7. Caltech: 32

8. Johns Hopkins University: 31

9. Cornell University: 30

10. Princeton: 29

Bwithh 17:29, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Harvard's official count of 42 includes only faculty members and former
faculty; alumni who did not become faculty members are not on its list but
account for most of the difference between Harvard's count and Wikipedia's.  
U.C. Berkeley officially counts only those laureates who taught there when
they won their Nobels or who joined the faculty later; adding alumni and 
former faculty to the list makes it much longer.

Cornell should have 32 Nobel Prizes, because the list does not include former professor Henry Taube, Chemistry 1983. Sorry, but I have no idea how to edit this page. --Xtreambar 17:19, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oberlin College claims that three of its graduates have received Nobel prizes. They are Robert Millikan, Oberlin graduate 1891 (Physics Prize 1923), Roger Sperry, Oberlin class of 1935 (Medicine/Physiology Prize 1981), and Stanley Cohen, Oberlin graduate 1945 (Medicine/Physiology Prize 1986). Reference is http://www.oberlin.edu/coladm/after/nobel.html

~anon

The Wikipedia article on A. A. Michelson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Abraham_Michelson says that he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. This is corraborated by the Naval Academy, http://www.usna.edu/LibExhibits/Michelson/Michelson_navy.html, also by the American Institute of Physics, http://www.aip.org/history/gap/Michelson/Michelson.html, also by nobel-winners.com, http://www.nobel-winners.com/Physics/albert_michelson.html and by the Nobel Prize Committee official site http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1907/michelson-bio.html 7802mark 21:39, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]