The figures are as of October 2026. Since some laureates are associated with more than one country, national totals can overlap.
US leads the Nobel tally
The US has nearly three times as many Nobel Prizes as the UK. After the top four, the numbers become much closer. Russia and Canada have 30 prizes each, followed by Switzerland with 27 and Austria with 25.
The Netherlands has 22, Italy 21, Poland 19 and Hungary 16. Australia has 15, while Israel, Denmark and Norway have 14 each.
American Nobel laureates have been recognised across several fields. President Theodore Roosevelt received the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for helping negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Martin Luther King Jr. won the 1964 Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle against racial discrimination.
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Ernest Hemingway won the 1954 Literature Prize for his influential storytelling, including The Old Man and the Sea. Barack Obama received the 2009 Peace Prize for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy, while Bob Dylan won the 2016 Literature Prize for his contributions to American songwriting.
Nobel winners beyond the biggest countries
Polish-born Marie Curie built her scientific career in France. She shared the 1903 Physics Prize for research on radioactivity and won the 1911 Chemistry Prize for her work on radium and polonium.
Albert Einstein received the 1921 Physics Prize for his contributions to theoretical physics, especially his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
Scotland's Alexander Fleming shared the 1945 Medicine Prize with Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Florey for the discovery of penicillin.
In 1993, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk shared the Peace Prize for helping bring about a peaceful end to apartheid and laying the foundations for democratic government.
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Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Iceland's Halldór Laxness won the 1955 Literature Prize.'
The 2026 Nobel winners
Francis Halzen won the 2026 Physics Prize for his contributions to IceCube and the discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai shared the Chemistry Prize, while Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel shared the Medicine Prize for discoveries behind optogenetics.
Canada's Anne Carson won the Literature Prize and South Africa's Navi Pillay received the Peace Prize. Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford shared the Prize in Economic Sciences.
The Nobel Prizes began in 1901 with five categories. The Prize in Economic Sciences was added in 1969 by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank.