- See also Wikipedia's article about "Nobel Prize".
The Nobel Prize is a highly prestigious academic award. It was founded by Alfred Nobel who decided to give back to the world after his dynamite creations were used to kill lots of people.
Today, many Nobel Prizes are claimed by the faculty and alumni of Columbia.
Methods of Counting
Universities count their Nobel Prizes in various ways, normally whatever gives them the most or the highest ranking among universities. By some accounts, Columbia has most Nobel Laureates of any university in the world. The University of Chicago and Cambridge are also often at the top.
However, there is controversy in this. Columbia counts all past and present alumni, faculty, and "affiliates" of the university who have ever won a Nobel Prize in its tally. This includes such questionable names as Linda Buck (postdoctoral research fellow), who fortunately shared it with alumnus and professor Richard Axel. Another questionable choice was Orhan Pamuk, whose principal pre-Nobel Columbia affiliation stemmed from the fact that he wrote a novel in a Butler reading room and gave a lecture to a mob of graduate students once. Naturally, after he won the prize, he was instantly promoted to Visiting Professor and named to the prestigious, prominent, and coherent Committee on Global Thought.
However, the one thing Columbia does pretty well in terms of counting is exclude affiliates who were with the university for less than one year. Chicago, on the other hand, decides to include them, even if they were there for just a few weeks.
Understandably, schools juggle and warp the numbers to fit their goals of maximizing their Nobel yield. For example, prior to Linda Buck and Richard Axel jointly winning the 2004 Prize in Physiology, Columbia praised its number of Nobel Prizes. After the Prize announcement, Columbia began to tout its number of Nobel Laureates (since Buck and Axel shared the Prize, it made for two laureates, instead of one prize). A second example is that Princeton shares Columbia's obsession with counting all alumni, faculty, and "affiliates" for the simple reason that Princeton, until post-World War II, did not have a sizable research program, and to this day is primarily an undergraduate institution.
The Nobel authorities seem to count university affiliation by the institution the laureate was affiliated with at the time of the award-winning announcement[1], a standard that Harvard adheres to. Nonetheless, a sizable community of purists believes that university affiliation should only be awarded where the laureate conducted the prize-winning research at said university.
In the list below, we haven't been anywhere near as strict with the above standards in counting who is a legitimate affiliate, but displayed their ties to the university. Judge for yourself!
Columbia-affiliated Nobel Prizes
Alumni and dropouts
| 1932 |
Irving Langmuir |
(B.S., 1903; M.A., 1906) |
| 1946 |
John H. Northrop |
(B.S., 1912; M.A., 1913; Ph.D., 1915) |
| 1972 |
William H. Stein |
(Ph.D., 1938) |
| 1981 |
Roald Hoffmann |
(B.A., 1958) |
| 1985 |
Herbert A. Hauptman |
(M.A., 1939) |
| 1989 |
Sidney Altman |
(graduate student, teaching assistant, 1960 to 1962) |
| 2001 |
William S. Knowles |
(Ph.D., 1942) |
| 2005 |
Robert H. Grubbs |
(Ph.D., 1968) |
| 2012 |
Robert Lefkowitz |
(B.A., 1962, M.D., 1966) |
| 2023 |
Louis E. Brus |
(Ph.D. 1969; faculty member, 1996-present) |
| 1971 |
Simon S. Kuznets |
(B.S., 1923; M.A., 1924; Ph.D., 1926) |
| 1972 |
Kenneth J. Arrow |
(M.A., 1941; Ph.D., 1951) |
| 1976 |
Milton Friedman |
(Researcher, 1943 to 1945; Ph.D., 1946; faculty member, 1937 to 1940 and 1964 to 1965) |
| 1993 |
Robert W. Fogel |
(M.A., 1960) |
| 1996 |
William S. Vickrey |
(M.A., 1937; Ph.D., 1948; faculty member, 1946 to 1996) |
| 1997 |
Robert C. Merton |
(B.S., 1966) |
| 2012 |
Alvin E. Roth |
(B.S., 1971) |
Literature
Peace
| 1923 |
Robert A. Millikan |
(Ph.D., 1895) |
| 1944 |
I. I. Rabi |
(Ph.D., 1927; faculty member, 1929 to 1988) |
| 1965 |
Julian S. Schwinger |
(B.A., 1936; Ph.D., 1939) |
| 1972 |
Leon N. Cooper |
(B.A., 1951; M.A., 1953; Ph.D., 1954) |
| 1975 |
James Rainwater |
(M.A., 1941; Ph.D., 1946; faculty member, 1939 to 1986) |
| 1978 |
Arno A. Penzias |
(M.A., 1958; Ph.D., 1962) |
| 1980 |
Val L. Fitch |
(Ph.D., 1954; faculty member, 1953 to 1954) |
| 1988 |
Leon M. Lederman |
(M.A., 1948; Ph.D., 1951; faculty member, 1951 to 1989) |
| 1988 |
Melvin Schwartz |
(B.A., 1953; Ph.D., 1958; faculty member, 1958 to 1966, 1991 to 2006)
|
| 1989 |
Norman F. Ramsey |
(B.A., 1935; Ph.D., 1940; faculty member, 1941 to 1947) |
| 1995 |
Martin L. Perl |
(Ph.D., 1955) |
| 2018 |
Arthur Ashkin |
(B.S., 1947) |
| 2022 |
John Clauser |
(M.A., 1966; Ph.D. 1969) |
| 1946 |
Hermann J. Muller |
(B.A., 1910; M.A., 1911; Ph.D., 1916; faculty member, 1918 to 1920)
|
| 1950 |
Edward C. Kendall |
(B.S., 1908; M.A., 1909; Ph.D., 1910) |
| 1956 |
Dickinson W. Richards |
(M.A., 1922; M.D., 1923; faculty member, 1925 to 1973) |
| 1958 |
Joshua Lederberg |
(B.A., 1944; medical student, 1944-1946; faculty member, 1990 to 1999) |
| 1964 |
Konrad E. Bloch |
(Ph.D., 1938; faculty member, 1938 to 1946, 1966) |
| 1967 |
George Wald |
(M.A., 1928) |
| 1973 |
Konrad Lorenz |
(Columbia College, 1922 to 1923) |
| 1976 |
Baruch S. Blumberg |
(Grad student in Mathematics, 1946 to 1947; M.D., 1951; resident, 1951-1953; fellow 1953-1955) |
| 1980 |
Baruj Benacerraf |
(B.S., 1942; research scientist, 1948 to 1950) |
| 1989 |
Harold E. Varmus |
(M.D., 1966; Presbyterian Hospital staff, 1966 to 1968, University Trustee, 2002 to 2005) |
| 1998 |
Louis J. Ignarro |
(B.S., 1962) |
| 2004 |
Richard Axel |
(A.B., 1967; resident, fellow and research scientist, 1971 to 1978; faculty member, 1978 to present) |
Non-alumni faculty and others
Literature
| 1987 |
Joseph Brodsky |
(faculty member, 1978 to 1985) |
| 1991 |
Nadine Gordimer |
(faculty member, 1971 to 1972, 1976 to 1978, 1983) |
| 1992 |
Derek Walcott |
(faculty member, 1979, 1981 to 1983, 1984) |
| 2006 |
Orhan Pamuk |
(visiting scholar, 1985 to 1988; fellow, 2006 to present) |
| 2010 |
Mario Vargas Llosa |
(visiting professor, 1975) |
Peace
| 1938 |
Enrico Fermi |
(faculty member, 1939 to 1945) |
| 1949 |
Hideki Yukawa |
(faculty member, 1949 to 1954) |
| 1955 |
Polykarp Kusch |
(faculty member, 1937 to 1972) |
| 1955 |
Willis E. Lamb |
(faculty member, 1938 to 1952, 1960 to 1961) |
| 1957 |
Tsung Dao Lee |
(faculty member, 1953 to present) |
| 1963 |
Maria Goeppert Mayer |
(faculty member, 1940 to 1946) |
| 1964 |
Charles H. Townes |
(faculty member, 1948 to 1961) |
| 1975 |
Aage Bohr |
(faculty member, 1949 to 1950) |
| 1976 |
Samuel C.C. Ting |
(faculty member, 1964 to 1967) |
| 1979 |
Steven Weinberg |
(faculty member, 1957 to 1959) |
| 1981 |
Arthur L. Schawlow |
(faculty member, 1949 to 1951, 1960) |
| 1984 |
Carlo Rubbia |
(postdoc at Nevis Laboratories, 1958 to 1960) |
| 1988 |
Jack Steinberger |
(faculty member, 1950 to 1970, 1985 to 1986, 1988 to 1998) |
| 1998 |
Horst Störmer |
(faculty member, 1998 to present) |
| 2006 |
John C. Mather |
(postdoc in Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 1974 to 1976) |
| 2021 |
Giorgio Parisi |
(visiting scientist, 1973 to 1974) |
| 1933 |
Thomas Hunt Morgan |
(faculty member, 1904 to 1928) |
| 1956 |
Andre F. Cournand |
(faculty member, 1935 to 1988) |
| 1969 |
Salvador E. Luria |
(faculty member, 1940 to 1942) |
| 1976 |
D. Carleton Gajdusek |
(postgraduate training, 1946 to 1947) |
| 1978 |
Daniel Nathans |
(intern and medical resident, 1954 to 1959) |
| 1982 |
Sune Bergström |
(research fellowship, 1940 to 1941) |
| 1990 |
E. Donnall Thomas |
(faculty member, 1955 to 1963) |
| 2000 |
Eric Kandel |
(faculty member, 1974 to present) |
| 2004 |
Linda Buck |
(postdoctoral fellow, 1980 to 1984; research scientist, 1984 to 1991) |
| 2013 |
James Rothman |
(faculty member, 2003 to 2008; part time 2008 to present) |
| 2021 |
David Julius |
(postdoc, 1984? to 1989) |
References
