Youngest Nobel Prize Winners

Celebrity / October 12, 2014

The Nobel Prize is a set of international prizes awarded annually for outstanding work in physics, medicine, chemistry, economics, literature and promotion of peace. Many young members of humanity have done our world proud by winning this award.

Here is a brief overview of the youngest Nobel Prize winners.

10) Tawakkol Karman (32 years)

Tawakkol Karman is a politician, journalist and human rights activist. She was the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976. She is a senior member of the Al-Aslah political party. She co-founded the group “Women Journalists Without Chains” in 2005.

9) Mairead Maguire (32 years)

This peace activist from Northern Ireland co-founded the Women for Peace (which later became the Community for Peace People) with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown. She shared the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize with Betty Williams.

8) Frederick G. Banting (32years)

Sir Frederick G. Banting and John James Rickard Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1923. Frederick Banting was the first person to use insulin on humans. He is the youngest Nobel laureate in this category.

7) Rudolf Mossbauer (32 years)

This German physicist was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence in the year 1957. The Mossbauer Effect is the basis for Mossbauer spectroscopy.

6) Tsung-Dao Lee (31 years)

This Chinese-born American physicist shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with C. N. Yang. Lee is well-known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars.

5) Carl D. Anderson (31 years)

This American physicist received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the positron in 1932 and muon in 1936. Muon is a subatomic particle that is 207 times more massive than the electron.

4) Paul A.M. Dirac (31 years)

This English theoretical physicist made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Shrodinger for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

3) Werner Heisenberg (31 years)

This German theoretical physicist was one of the key creators of quantum mechanics. He published his uncertainty principle in 1927. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 for the creation of quantum mechanics.

2) Lawrence Bragg (25 years)

This Australian-born British physicist discovered the Bragg law of X-ray diffraction. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915. He was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, when the discovery of the structure of DNA was reported in 1953. He was knighted in 1941.

1) Malala Yousafzai (17 years)

This Pakistani activist for female education became the youngest ever Nobel Prize recipient in any category. For 2014, she shares the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children’s right activist. Malala spoke at the headquarters of the UN on July 12, 2013 to call for worldwide access to education.