What is the Nobel Prize?
The Nobel Prize is a set of prestigious awards given in various categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions. They are given for outstanding achievement in the fields of Chemistry, Literature, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize is the world’s most famous and well reputed award.
These set of awards given in various categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions. They are given for outstanding achievement in the fields of Chemistry, Literature, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine. While these prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway.
The sixth Nobel Prize, for Economics was created by Swedish National Bank in 1968 and named after Alfred Nobel as well. The Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, medal, and cash award.
History of the Nobel Prize
The story about the origin of the Nobel prize is an interesting one. Here’s about how it started
The Nobel prizes are given by an organization called the Nobel Foundation. This is named after Alfred Bernhard Nobel, who was a rich Swedish businessman, chemist, engineer, inventor, and also philanthropist. He invented many things (he actually held 355 different patents), but he is best known for inventing a high explosive called dynamite. He also owned an arms manufacturing company called Bofors.
But, why did he start the award?
So, that’s the interesting part about the history of the Nobel prize. It can be said that a mistake by a French newspaper had a lot to do with its creation.
What happened was that when Alfred’s brother, Ludvig died, a French newspaper mistakenly published Alfred’s obituary (a news article that is published after the recent death of a person to inform the general public about it) instead. It read, “The merchant of death is dead”. It went on to say that, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”
Reading this had a deep impact on Alfred and he decided to set aside most of his wealth to create the Nobel Prizes. He stated that he wished to create a fund and its interest should be given as “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.
He said that he wished that “when awarding the prizes, no consideration be given to nationality, but that the prize be awarded to the worthiest person, whether or not they are Scandinavian.” This is why the prizes are given every year.
How much is the prize money of the Nobel award?
The cash prize this year is about US$1,110,000. This is Rs.72,227,297.37 (Rs. Seven crore twenty-two lakh twenty-seven thousand two hundred and ninety-seven and thirty-seven paise) in Indian currency.
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[…] wrote a piece on what the Nobel is a while ago. You can read it here.But, very quickly, here’s what it […]
[…] first, what’s a Nobel Prize (here’s a quick intro, but you can read all about it here – it’s an interesting story)The Nobel Prize is named after a person called Alfred […]