Nobel Prize controversies

Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prize has engendered controversy and criticism. After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel established that an annual prize be awarded for service to humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Similarly, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, first awarded in 1969, is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes. Nobel sought to reward "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". Awards committees have historically rewarded discoveries over inventions.

No Nobel Prize was established for mathematics and many other scientific and cultural fields. An early theory that envy or rivalry led Nobel to omit a prize to mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler was refuted because of timing inaccuracies. Another myth that states that Nobel's spouse had an affair with a mathematician (sometimes attributed as Mittag-Leffler) has been equally debunked: Nobel was never married. A more likely explanation is that Nobel did not consider mathematics as a practical discipline, and too theoretical to benefit humankind, as well as his personal lack of interest in the field and the fact that an award to mathematicians given by Oscar II already existed at the time. Both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize have been described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics".

The most notorious controversies have been over prizes for Literature, Peace, and Economics. Beyond disputes over which contributor's work was more worthy, critics most often discerned political bias and Eurocentrism in the result.

A major controversy-generating factor for the more recent scientific prizes (Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine) is the Nobel rule that each award can be shared by no more than two different research areas and no more than three different individuals each year. This rule was adequate in 1901, when most of the science research was performed by individual scientists working with their small group of assistants in relative isolation. In more recent times science research has increasingly become a matter of widespread international cooperation and exchange of ideas among different research groups, themselves composed of dozens or even hundreds of researchers. The three person limit has then led to glaring omissions of key participants in awarded research.

Multiple commentators have noted that the two area, three person limit, without prizes to organizations, is mentioned nowhere in Nobel's will. These limitations were added by the award committee, and could be easily changed. The Nobel Peace Prize, for example, is often granted to organizations. This would certainly have been appropriate for the physics discoveries made by huge research consortiums such as ATLAS/CMS (2013) or LIGO (2017).