Nobel Prize Analysis: Setup and Context

Introduction

On November 27, 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will in Paris. When it was opened after his death, the will caused a lot of controversy, as Nobel had left much of his wealth for the establishment of a prize.

Alfred Nobel dictates that his entire remaining estate should be used to endow “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.

Every year the Nobel Prize is given to scientists and scholars in the categories chemistry, literature, physics, physiology or medicine, economics, and peace.

Let's see what patterns we can find in the data of the past Nobel laureates. What can we learn about the Nobel prize and our world more generally?

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Import Statements

Notebook Presentation

Read the Data

Caveats: The exact birth dates for Michael Houghton, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, and Nadia Murad are unknown. I've substituted them with mid-year estimate of July 2nd.

Data Exploration & Cleaning

Challenge: Preliminary data exploration.

Challange:

Check for Duplicates

Check for NaN Values

Type Conversions

Challenge:

Convert Year and Birth Date to Datetime

Add a Column with the Prize Share as a Percentage

Plotly Donut Chart: Percentage of Male vs. Female Laureates

Challenge: Create a donut chart using plotly which shows how many prizes went to men compared to how many prizes went to women. What percentage of all the prizes went to women?

Who were the first 3 Women to Win the Nobel Prize?

Challenge:

Find the Repeat Winners

Challenge: Did some people get a Nobel Prize more than once? If so, who were they?

Number of Prizes per Category

Challenge:

Challenge:

Male and Female Winners by Category

Challenge: Create a plotly bar chart that shows the split between men and women by category.

Number of Prizes Awarded Over Time

Challenge: Are more prizes awarded recently than when the prize was first created? Show the trend in awards visually.

Are More Prizes Shared Than Before?

Challenge: Investigate if more prizes are shared than before.

The Countries with the Most Nobel Prizes

Challenge:

Use a Choropleth Map to Show the Number of Prizes Won by Country

Hint: You'll need to use a 3 letter country code for each country.

In Which Categories are the Different Countries Winning Prizes?

Challenge: See if you can divide up the plotly bar chart you created above to show the which categories made up the total number of prizes.

The hard part is preparing the data for this chart!

Hint: Take a two-step approach. The first step is grouping the data by country and category. Then you can create a DataFrame that looks something like this:

Number of Prizes Won by Each Country Over Time

What are the Top Research Organisations?

Challenge: Create a bar chart showing the organisations affiliated with the Nobel laureates.

Which Cities Make the Most Discoveries?

Where do major discoveries take place?

Challenge:

Where are Nobel Laureates Born? Chart the Laureate Birth Cities

Challenge:

Plotly Sunburst Chart: Combine Country, City, and Organisation

Challenge:

Patterns in the Laureate Age at the Time of the Award

How Old Are the Laureates When the Win the Prize?

Challenge: Calculate the age of the laureate in the year of the ceremony and add this as a column called winning_age to the df_data DataFrame. Hint: you can use this to help you.

Who were the oldest and youngest winners?

Challenge:

Descriptive Statistics for the Laureate Age at Time of Award

Age at Time of Award throughout History

Are Nobel laureates being nominated later in life than before? Have the ages of laureates at the time of the award increased or decreased over time?

Challenge

Winning Age Across the Nobel Prize Categories

How does the age of laureates vary by category?

Challenge