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This piece was initially revealed within the second concern of Nightingale, the printed journal of the Knowledge Visualization Society.
Despite the fact that I received my Ph.D. in Community and Knowledge Science, I’ve at all times stayed near my roots, particularly in Physics, at any time when in search of inspiration. Rising up in Hungary, I used to be notably amazed by the achievements of “The Martians,” a bunch of famend scientists who emigrated from Hungary to the US round World Warfare II. Curiously, a few of them even went to the identical highschool.
The Martians included, as an illustration, Leó Szilárd, who not solely found the idea of nuclear chain response but in addition co-patented the fridge with Albert Einstein and Eugene Wigner–a key scientist on the Manhattan Venture–main the event of the primary nuclear reactor. For his contributions, Wigner acquired the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, numbering among the many 18 Nobel Prizes which were linked to thinkers with Hungarian origins.
These 18 prizes solely measure about three % of all of the Nobel Prizes ever awarded. Actually, since 1901, about 600 prizes have gone to considerably lower than a thousand laureates within the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Drugs, Literature, Peace, and–beginning in 1969–Economics. The positioning NobelPrize.org highlights different thrilling statistics in regards to the prize and its awardees: from the youngest (17 years previous) 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 household dominated the Nobel. Marie Curie first shared a prize together with her husband, Pierre, and later acquired a second award. Moreover, the mighty couple produced a Nobel-winning inheritor. Their daughter, Irène Curie, who shared the popularity together with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, was awarded the prize within the discipline of Chemistry in 1935. Marie Curie was a member of one other fabulous instance of the interlinked small world of laureates (sadly, Pierre handed away in 1906): the Solvay Convention on Physics in 1911. It was most likely essentially the most spectacular line-up in science ever: 27 of the 29 members had both already received, or later acquired, the Nobel Prize.
The tales of the Martians, the Curie household, the Manhattan Venture, and the Solvay Convention all counsel that, behind the scenes, some critically intertwined social networks are at work amongst Nobel laureates. To hint this community, I went to essentially the most extensively used on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and picked up the Wiki web page textual content of every laureate.
Then, in every laureate’s web page textual content, I counted the mentions of all the opposite names, noting whether or not any pairings shared a standard historical past noteworthy for Wikipedia. This fashion, I constructed a community of 682 nodes and 588 hyperlinks, the place nodes correspond to laureates, and the power of the hyperlink between two nodes is proportional to the variety of instances their Wiki websites reference one another. Moreover, I downloaded the overall view depend of every laureate’s web page and set their community node dimension proportional to the logarithm of that quantity. This node scaling ultimately highlighted people who have develop into family names. To finalize the community visualization, I utilized coloration coding that corresponds to the scientific disciplines. You might discover the lead to Determine 1.
To me, as a community scientist, the primary and most placing commentary in regards to the community is its core-periphery separation: a big, related element within the middle (a so-called big element) which comprises greater than 30 % of the nodes, and a fragmented ring round it with smaller community parts, with sizes as much as ten nodes. Probably the most frequent element sizes are as few as two and three nodes, which aligns nicely with the truth that the Nobel Prize might be shared amongst a most of three laureates, and shared prizes have gotten increasingly frequent within the majority of fields.
I additionally realized that nodes within the big element are bigger, which means considerably greater visibility and a better variety of search hits for these laureates, as measured by logarithm of their Wiki view counts. After trying into the information, it seems that the median Wiki-view depend is 351,005 within the central element, whereas solely 170,510 for the outer ring, and the common view depend worth is about 2.5 instances greater for the central element than for the outer ring. So it appears, the central clique is far more common!
However who’re they? The coloring with the green-yellowish shades versus reddish tones is supposed to differentiate sciences from humanities, coinciding with the left and proper sides of the enormous element. These sides are linked by Sir James Chadwick, who received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for locating the neutron and who additionally turned a scientific advisor to the United Nations. The science facet (Determine 2a), headlining researchers like Albert Einstein and Max Planck, appears to have a robust root within the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1700–1945) and can also be robust 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 facet (Determine 2b), we will see some fairly common figures. Apparently, science just isn’t the best way to world fame! There are instantly two central laureate organizations that strike the attention: the European Union and the United Nations, each awarded Nobel Peace Prizes. Notable people embody distinguished politicians, akin to Barack Obama or Henry Kissinger, the human rights activist Nelson Mandela, and the economist Milton Friedman (with Hungarian, however non-Martian, roots).
As for the outer components, there are just a few famously social people, akin to Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Feynman — personally, my favourite Nobel laureate for each his scientific contribution and his playful and eccentric character. These people, regardless of dwelling busy lives, are considerably remoted from the community, possible because of the time and geographical areas of their lively years in comparison with different laureates. Moreover, the information could also be incomplete right here as Wikipedia is neither good nor 100% correct in documenting social connections, and sadly (or not?), Fb didn’t exist at the moment.
Lastly, the Hungarians and the Martians: trying on the knowledge, it seems that a lot of them should not related to even a single Nobel laureate, and those that are members of the community are merely scattered round. The explanations behind this are unclear — possibly the legend of the Martians is overrated, or possibly there weren’t sufficient of them awarded a Nobel to seem within the community visibility. One factor is for positive, although: the Manhattan Venture counted seven Nobel laureates whereas it was operational and, later, a dozen extra, however amongst them solely Wigner was from the Martians.
As inspirational as it’s to scan all these names and connections in The Nobel Community, and regardless of the way it makes me actually really feel as if I’m “standing on the shoulders of giants,” the community has its flaws. Apart from the peripheral Japanese Europeans, we see an elite membership rising within the middle with the vast majority of common names clustered collectively within the big element, excluding two-thirds of the community. This means that two-thirds of the laureates simply stroll away with the prize and return to their work, and solely the remaining third have interaction in seen connections, be it friendships or collaborations. As “The entire is larger than the sum of the components,” lacking greater than 60 % of these sensible minds from the central circulation of concepts appears a pity.
Much more missed alternatives come up. The central element itself is break up into two camps: science and humanities. This polarization very a lot goes in opposition to as we speak’s most important course, interdisciplinary analysis, which supplies us the ability to sort out main societal issues by no means skilled earlier than. Moreover, the community reveals the low variety of feminine laureates. Regardless of the distinctive historical past of Marie Curie, solely about six % of laureates had been feminine, most of whom had been awarded the Peace Prize (16.5 % of 109 awarded) and the least of whom earned awards in Physics (1.8 % of 219 awarded).
Nonetheless, all just isn’t misplaced. Mapping workouts like this one will help reveal these points, which in any other case are barely seen, even to essentially the most avid Nobel followers. Zooming out and using community science can spotlight in any other case hidden patterns and allow understanding, which is step one in figuring out future options, be it about gender gaps or elitist cliques.
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