Stockholm (AFP)
Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have rewarded men, women and organizations who have worked for the progress of humanity, according to the wish of their creator, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Here are five things to know about their story.
Nobel, the poet
Enamored of English poetry, a great lover of Shelley and Byron, Alfred Nobel remained in history as the inventor of dynamite, but he never ceased to verse, in Swedish or in the language of Shakespeare. In a letter to a friend, he writes: "I do not have the slightest pretension to describe poetry as poetry, I write from time to time for the sole purpose of relieving depression or improving my English." In 1862, the young man of 29, doubting his talent, wrote to a young woman, in French: "Physics is my domain, not the pen". The year of his death (1896), he wrote a scandalous tragedy, "Nemesis", inspired by Shelley's play "Les Cenci", on the execution in the 16th century in Rome of a woman who murdered her father-in-law incestuous.
In family
The history of the French Curie family merges with that of the Nobel Prizes. In 1903 the couple Pierre and Marie Curie is rewarded in physics; in 1911 Marie Curie (née Sklodowska) receives the chemistry prize, which makes her the only double winner; in 1935, his daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric Joliot were awarded the prize for chemistry.
The youngest sister of Irene, Eve Curie will marry Henry Richardson Labouisse who, as Director of Unicef, will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. Other couples have been rewarded. In 1974, the Swede Gunnar Myrdal received the economy prize, and eight years later his wife Alva that of peace. Fathers and sons also listed their names in the Nobel History, like the Bohr: Niels, the father, received the prize for physics in 1922, and Aage Niels, the son, in 1975.
In absentia
Since 1901, five peace laureates have been unable to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. In 1936, German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky languished in a Nazi concentration camp. In 2010, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is imprisoned. His chair, on which the price is deposited, is symbolically left empty. In 1975, Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov was replaced by his wife Elena Bonner. In 1983, Polish trade unionist Lech Walesa gave up traveling to Oslo for fear of being unable to return to his country. Under house arrest, the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, awarded in 1991, is authorized by the military junta to travel to Oslo, but abstains for the same reasons.
maths
Why is there no Nobel for mathematics? Researchers in the 1980s coined a stubborn legend: Alfred would have avenged the lover of one of his mistresses, the mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler. Nothing supports this hypothesis. The most plausible explanation for this absence is twofold: in 1895, when Nobel wrote his will, a reward already exists in Sweden for mathematics and he does not see the benefit of instituting a second one. Moreover, at the beginning of the 20th century, applied disciplines are favored by elites and opinion: what does humanity owe to mathematics?
posthumous
Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that a prize can not be awarded posthumously, unless death occurs after the announcement of the name of the winner. Before 1974, only two disappeared figures, Swedes, had been rewarded: the diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld (peace prize in 1961) and the poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (literature in 1931). In 2011, amazement: after the award of the medicine prize, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute learns the death three days ago of a winner, the Canadian Ralph Steinman. The foundation nevertheless decides to engrave its name in its prestigious list of achievements.
© 2019 AFP