8 Youngest Nobel Prize Winner

The Nobel Prize is the highest form of honour provided to individuals who have done exceptionally in their fields. The prize was established by Sir Alfred Nobel who in his final will bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million SEK to establish the five Nobel Prizes. Nomination forms are sent by the Nobel Committee to about 3,000 individuals, usually in September the year before the prizes are awarded. These individuals are generally prominent academics working in a relevant area. Sometimes these nominated individuals are surprisingly young making one wonder, how age indeed is just a number.

Posted On November 6th, 2020

Malala Yousfzai, 17

On 10 October 2014, Yousafzai was announced as the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education. Having received the prize at the age of 17, Yousafzai is the youngest Nobel laureate.

Lawrence Bragg, 25

An Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 25. Bragg was also knighted in 1941. He was joint recipient (with his father, William Henry Bragg) of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915.

Nadia Murad, 25

She is the first Iraqi and Yazidi to be awarded a Nobel Prize. In 2018, she and Denis Mukwege were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict". In 2014, she was kidnapped from her hometown Kocho and held by the Islamic State for three months.

Werner Heisenberg, 31

A German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics".

Tsung Dao Lee, 31

Lee remains the youngest Nobel laureate in the science fields after World War II. He is the third-youngest Nobel laureate in sciences in history after William L. Bragg and Werner Heisenberg. Lee and Yang were the first Chinese laureates. Since he became a naturalized American citizen in 1962, Lee is also the youngest American ever to have won a Nobel Prize. Safe to say he has a much younger laceration to his name.

Carl D Anderson, 31

He is best known for his discovery of the positron or antielectron. Also in 1936, Anderson and his first graduate student, Seth Neddermeyer, discovered a muon (or 'mu-meson', as it was known for many years), a subatomic particle 207 times more massive than the electron

Paul A.M Dirac, 31

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, formulated the Dirac equation and contributed to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics.