10 Youngest Nobel Prize Winners

The Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in the world that is given to people who have made significant contributions in their field. The name of the award is the Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. In his will, Alfred wanted to use all of his wealth to honor important people who have served humanity. In this article we will talk about the youngest Nobel laureates of all time.

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Brief history of the Nobel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the world

10. Tawakkol Karman

Journalist, politician and human rights activist Tawakkol Karman was born on February 7, 1979 in Yemen. He played a key role in Yemen’s pro-democracy youth movement in 2011. Known as the “Mother of the Revolution”, the “Iron Lady” and the “Lady of the Arab Spring”, Karman won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. He was 32 years old at the time. Karman became the first Arab woman and the second Muslim to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

9. Mairead Corrigan

Mairead Corrigan is the founder of the peace movement in Northern Ireland. He was born on January 27, 1944 and received the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize “for his courageous efforts to end the violent conflict in Northern Ireland.” He was 32 years old when he received the award.

8. Frederick J. Banting

Frederick Grant Banting, born in Canada on November 14, 1891, is a medical scientist, physician, and painter. In 1923, at the age of 32, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of insulin.”

7. Rudolf Mossbauer

German physicist Rudolf Ludwig Mossbauer was born on January 31, 1929 in Munich, the son of Ludwig Mossbauer and his wife, Erna. In 1957, Mossbauer invented the spectroscopy technique. Four years later, in 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. He was 32 years old at the time.

6. Tsung Dao Lee

Tsung-Dao Lee was born on November 24, 1926 in Shanghai, China, the third child of Tsing-Kong Lee and Ming-Chang Chang. Received the Nobel Prize “for his work on the laws of valence, which led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles.” He won the award in 1957, when he was only 31 years old. He was the second youngest scientist to receive a Nobel Prize at the time.

5. Carl D. Anderson

American physicist Carl David Anderson was born on September 3, 1905 in New York. In 1932, while examining traces of cosmic ray particles in a cloud chamber, he discovered a positively charged particle with a mass apparently equal to that of an electron. The first experimentally proven antiparticle was the Anderson particle and was called the “positron”. Four years later, in 1936, at the age of 31, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

4. Paul Dirac

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on August 8, 1902, in Bristol, England. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Bristol. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 “for his discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.” He was 31 years old at the time.

3. Werner Heisenberg

German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg was born on December 5, 1901. In 1925 he formulated a type of quantum mechanics based on matrices. In 1927, he proposed the “uncertainty relation”, which sets limits on how exactly a particle’s position and velocity can be determined simultaneously. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932. He was 31 years old when he won the prize.

2. Lawrence Bragg

William Henry Bragg, son of William Lawrence Bragg, was born on 31 March 1890 in Adelaide, South Australia. In 1915, Lawrence Bragg, at the age of 25, became the youngest person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays.” This record would not be broken for 99 years. Currently, he is the second youngest person to win a Nobel Prize.

1. Malala Yousafzai

Born on July 12, 1997 in Mingora, Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai ranks first on our list as the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize. Yousafzai was born in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. Girls’ schools were burned when the Islamist movement Taliban took control of the valley in 2008. It didn’t take long for the Taliban to threaten his life. Malala was shot in the head on a school bus in 2012. He survived, but because of a fatwa issued against him he fled to England and lived there in exile. In 2013, he was named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at the age of 17, “for his struggle for the right of all children to education, and against the oppression of children and young people.” Malala Yousafzai is currently the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize.