About this site

Why it is useful to students

Award citations are the shortest honest summary of a discovery ever written. Each one states what was found, by whom, and why it mattered, in a sentence that had to survive a committee. This site collects them and makes them browsable in the terms a student already has.

• Sorted by school subject. Every award is tagged with the class its work belongs to — Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Math, CS, and Earth Science — so the subject pages turn "we are studying genetics this term" into the people who did the defining work in it.
• Usable as a source. Every page carries a canonical address and links out to the awarding body's own record, so a citation in an essay or a bibliography is a copy and a paste rather than a search.
• Fast and free everywhere. These are plain HTML pages. No account, no paywall, no cookie banner, no autoplaying anything. They open on a school Chromebook and on a phone with one bar of signal.
• Practice at reading data. The explorer ranks laureates and countries and then lets a reader test the ranking — dividing by population changes the leaderboard completely, and noticing why is the lesson.
• Geography and history in one view. The atlas plots where laureates were born against the institutions where they later worked. The distance between the two dots is a century of migration, visible at a glance.

What you can do here

• Prizes — the award families, each with a short description and an editorial prestige score, opening onto that prize's categories, its award years, and a page for every recipient with the full citation.
• People — every laureate on record, listed by surname. A person's page gathers all of their awards in one place, which is where the repeat winners become obvious.
• Subjects — the same awards regrouped by high school class, with the institutions that recur in each field.
• Countries — laureates by country of birth, award-time institution, or death, and Institutions — the universities, laboratories, and organizations where the recognized work was done.
• Map — birthplaces and institutions on one atlas, filterable by subject.
• The explorer — ranked leaderboards, laureates per million people, and a chart of those who won before turning forty.

Where the data comes from

One row per recipient, compiled from each award's official record and cross-checked against Wikipedia and Wikidata. Institutions are keyed off their Wikidata entry and matched against the Research Organization Registry (ROR) and OpenAlex to resolve a name to a specific place and to link out to that organization's own record, and laureates are linked to their ORCID identifier where one exists. Fields are verified individually rather than imported wholesale, and the standing rule is to leave a cell blank rather than guess: a missing birthplace here means nobody could confirm it, not that it was rounded to something plausible. Places use their present-day names, so a laureate born in Königsberg in 1904 is listed under Kaliningrad, Russia.

The pages themselves are generated from that database by a build script and served as fixed files. Nothing is assembled while you read it, and nothing about your visit is recorded. The one exception is the explorer, which may ask a public service which country you are browsing from in order to show your country's laureates first; if that request fails the rest of the page is unaffected.

Design philosophy

This site is built to work first on a phone with a slow connection, then on a desktop — not the other way around. That means plain HTML, small pages, and no framework weighing down a Chromebook in a school with one bar of signal or a browser in a market where bandwidth is expensive. The goal is the same on every device: free, fast, and informative, with nothing standing between a reader and the answer.

The curated data and original site content are dual-licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned), with no invariant or cover sections. The source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. References throughout point back to their sources — the awarding body's own record, Wikidata, Wikipedia, the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and OpenAlex — so a fact here can always be traced to where it came from.

A laureate's page is meant to be a beginning, not an ending. Alongside the citation, every one links out to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Brave, and Wikipedia with the award already framed as a question, so a reader who wants more than the summary can go get it in one click. Where a laureate's OpenAlex record exists, that page links there too, which is where the trail goes from a plain-language explanation to the specific papers the person actually wrote — the same site works whether the reader is meeting the subject for the first time or already reading the literature. Institution pages do the same for a different question: where an affiliation publishes how to apply, that link is here too, for anyone weighing where they might study next.

The map and the nearby page turn the same data into geography. The map plots birthplaces against the institutions where laureates later worked, filterable by subject, so a reader can drill into one region or one field at a time. Nearby does the same from wherever the reader actually is, using their location to surface the closest laureate birthplaces and institutions.

The longer aim is a site where, a century from now, a good number of today's winners are still remembered the way Einstein is. On most prizes only a handful will ever reach that, so the prize list itself is chosen with a power-law bet in mind, not an expectation that every winner on it will last.

Everything is also searchable by high school subject — Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math, and the rest — because the site is built primarily for science and math students. We like literature and the arts as much as anyone, but early on we chose to keep this collection focused rather than trying to cover every field at once.

We think many of these people are adding to the knowledge of humanity and promoting humanity's quality of life going forward. These people should be treasured not only as national heroes but as global citizens who have promoted humanity. We only removed the Nobel Prize in Literature and other arts prizes to simplify the process, not that these other awards are less in any way.

Which prizes make the list

A prize is included if it clears at least one of three bars: recipients clearly drawn from around the world rather than one country, a history longer than 25 years, or a purse over one million dollars. Meeting any single bar is enough — the Breakthrough Prize qualifies on its purse alone at fourteen years old, the Shaw Prize the same way at twenty-two, and the Abel Prize on its international recipient list at twenty-three. Everything else on the list clears the age bar outright, several of them by a century or more.

One list we found useful while assembling ours is the European Research Council's roundup of scientific prizes. Not everything on it is here: EMBO's awards go only to Europe, and the Holberg and Balzan prizes are not specifically science prizes.

If a prize clears one of those bars and is not here yet, add it: send a pull request or open an issue on GitHub, get in touch. The data is one row per recipient, so a new prize is a contribution anyone can make.