This piece was originally published within the second issue of Nightingale, the printed magazine of the Data Visualization Society.
Despite the fact that I got my Ph.D. in Network and Data Science, I even have at all times stayed near my roots, especially in Physics, every time in search of inspiration. Growing up in Hungary, I used to be particularly amazed by the achievements of “The Martians,” a bunch of renowned scientists who emigrated from Hungary to the US around World War II. Interestingly, a few of them even went to the identical highschool.
The Martians included, for example, Leó Szilárd, who not only discovered the idea of nuclear chain response but in addition co-patented the refrigerator with Albert Einstein and Eugene Wigner–a key scientist on the Manhattan Project–leading the event of the primary nuclear reactor. For his contributions, Wigner received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, numbering among the many 18 Nobel Prizes which were linked to thinkers with Hungarian origins.
Those 18 prizes only measure about three percent of all of the Nobel Prizes ever awarded. In reality, since 1901, about 600 prizes have gone to somewhat lower than a thousand laureates within the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and–starting in 1969–Economics. The location NobelPrize.org highlights other exciting statistics in regards to the prize and its awardees: from the youngest (17 years old) and oldest (97) laureates to multiple-prize winners akin to John Bardeen (Physics, 1956 and 1972), Linus Pauling (Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962), and Marie Skłodowska-Curie (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911).
The Curie family dominated the Nobel. Marie Curie first shared a prize along with her husband, Pierre, and later received a second award. Moreover, the mighty couple produced a Nobel-winning heir. Their daughter, Irène Curie, who shared the popularity along with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, was awarded the prize in the sector of Chemistry in 1935. Marie Curie was a member of one other fabulous example of the interlinked small world of laureates (sadly, Pierre passed away in 1906): the Solvay Conference on Physics in 1911. It was probably probably the most impressive line-up in science ever: 27 of the 29 participants had either already won, or later received, the Nobel Prize.
The stories of the Martians, the Curie family, the Manhattan Project, and the Solvay Conference all suggest that, behind the scenes, some seriously intertwined social networks are at work amongst Nobel laureates. To trace this network, I went to probably the most widely used online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and picked up the Wiki page text of every laureate.
Then, in each laureate’s page text, I counted the mentions of all the opposite names, noting whether any pairings shared a standard history noteworthy for Wikipedia. This manner, I built a network of 682 nodes and 588 links, where nodes correspond to laureates, and the strength of the link between two nodes is proportional to the variety of times their Wiki sites reference one another. Moreover, I downloaded the overall view count of every laureate’s page and set their network node size proportional to the logarithm of that number. This node scaling eventually highlighted people who have develop into household names. To finalize the network visualization, I applied color coding that corresponds to the scientific disciplines. You might find the end in Figure 1.
To me, as a network scientist, the primary and most striking commentary in regards to the network is its core-periphery separation: a big, connected component in the middle (a so-called giant component) which accommodates greater than 30 percent of the nodes, and a fragmented ring around it with smaller network components, with sizes as much as ten nodes. Essentially the most frequent component sizes are as few as two and three nodes, which aligns well with the proven fact that the Nobel Prize may be shared amongst a maximum of three laureates, and shared prizes have gotten an increasing number of common in nearly all of fields.
I also realized that nodes in the enormous component are larger, meaning significantly higher visibility and a greater variety of search hits for those laureates, as measured by logarithm of their Wiki view counts. After looking into the information, it seems that the median Wiki-view count is 351,005 within the central component, while only 170,510 for the outer ring, and the common view count value is about 2.5 times higher for the central component than for the outer ring. So it seems, the central clique is far more popular!
But who’re they? The coloring with the green-yellowish shades versus reddish tones is supposed to tell apart sciences from humanities, coinciding with the left and right sides of the enormous component. These sides are linked by Sir James Chadwick, who won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for locating the neutron and who also became a scientific advisor to the United Nations. The science side (Figure 2a), headlining researchers like Albert Einstein and Max Planck, seems to have a powerful root within the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1700–1945) and can be strong amongst the founders of recent Physics, from the Curies to Enrico Fermi and Eugene Wigner or György Hevesy (each with Hungarian and Martian roots).
On the humanities side (Figure 2b), we will see some quite popular figures. Apparently, science will not be the solution to world fame! There are immediately two central laureate organizations that strike the attention: the European Union and the United Nations, each awarded Nobel Peace Prizes. Notable individuals include distinguished politicians, akin to Barack Obama or Henry Kissinger, the human rights activist Nelson Mandela, and the economist Milton Friedman (with Hungarian, but non-Martian, roots).
As for the outer parts, there are just a few famously social individuals, akin to Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Feynman — personally, my favorite Nobel laureate for each his scientific contribution and his playful and eccentric personality. These individuals, despite living busy lives, are somewhat isolated from the network, likely attributable to the time and geographical locations of their energetic years in comparison with other laureates. Moreover, the information could also be incomplete here as Wikipedia is neither perfect nor one hundred pc accurate in documenting social connections, and sadly (or not?), Facebook didn’t exist at the moment.
Finally, the Hungarians and the Martians: the information, it seems that lots of them should not connected to even a single Nobel laureate, and those that are members of the network are simply scattered around. The explanations behind this are unclear — possibly the legend of the Martians is overrated, or possibly there weren’t enough of them awarded a Nobel to look within the network visibility. One thing is obviously, though: the Manhattan Project counted seven Nobel laureates while it was operational and, later, a dozen more, but amongst them only Wigner was from the Martians.
As inspirational because it is to scan all these names and connections in The Nobel Network, and despite the way it makes me truly feel as if I’m “standing on the shoulders of giants,” the network has its flaws. Besides the peripheral Eastern Europeans, we see an elite club emerging in the middle with nearly all of popular names clustered together in the enormous component, excluding two-thirds of the network. This implies that two-thirds of the laureates just walk away with the prize and return to their work, and only the remaining third engage in visible connections, be it friendships or collaborations. As “The entire is larger than the sum of the parts,” missing greater than 60 percent of those good minds from the central flow of ideas seems a pity.
Much more missed opportunities arise. The central component itself is split into two camps: science and humanities. This polarization very much goes against today’s primary direction, interdisciplinary research, which provides us the ability to tackle major societal problems never experienced before. Moreover, the network reveals the low variety of female laureates. Despite the exceptional history of Marie Curie, only about six percent of laureates were female, most of whom were awarded the Peace Prize (16.5 percent of 109 awarded) and the least of whom earned awards in Physics (1.8 percent of 219 awarded).
Still, all will not be lost. Mapping exercises like this one will help reveal these issues, which otherwise are barely visible, even to probably the most avid Nobel fans. Zooming out and utilizing network science can highlight otherwise hidden patterns and enable understanding, which is step one in identifying future solutions, be it about gender gaps or elitist cliques.