The Geography of Discovery

Where the world's prize-winning science was done, decade by decade.

Data as of 16 Oct 2026

661 of 668 Nobel science prizes placed at the city where the work was done · Nobel Prize API, Wikidata

Where the prizes were won

Each cell is a metro's share of the Nobel Physics, Chemistry and Medicine prize weight in a decade. Darker is bigger.

How the shares are built

Weight is the prize's tier weight divided among that year's winners, credited to the metro where each winner worked when the prize was awarded. Eight metros are shown, the leaders over the whole period.

Paris and Berlin led the first four decades, with Copenhagen sharing the 1920s. From the 1940s an American metro led or co-led every decade: New York and Boston first, then Los Angeles in the 1990s. The San Francisco Bay Area has led or shared the lead in every decade since 2000.

Share of each decade’s Nobel science prize weight, by metro where the work was done, in whole percent.
Metro	1900s	1910s	1920s	1930s	1940s	1950s	1960s	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s	2010s	2020s
New York	0	5	0	9	20 (leader)	18 (leader)	5	12 (leader)	8	12	9 (leader)	9 (leader)	11
SF Bay Area	0	0	0	4	5	13	12	5	11 (leader)	10	9 (leader)	9 (leader)	14 (leader)
Boston	0	5	0	3	5	6	14 (leader)	11	11 (leader)	14	9	3	6
Paris	17 (leader)	9	11 (leader)	4	0	0	7	0	1	8	5	3	4
London	9	2	7	4	6	2	7	9	2	0	2	2	3
Los Angeles	0	0	4	6	0	4	9	0	4	17 (leader)	3	5	2
Berlin	15	14 (leader)	7	11 (leader)	5	0	0	0	1	0	3	0	4
Cambridge (UK)	4	0	7	4	0	7	7	6	6	1	2	7	0

0%20%Leader of the decade (all tied metros outlined)The 2020s cover 2020 to 2026 only.

Leaders that are not one of these eight rows: Copenhagen (1920s). Cambridge here is Cambridge, UK; Harvard and MIT are counted under Boston.

The capital of science, by decade

The metro with the most Nobel science prize weight in each decade, and the one behind it.

How this is measured

Where two or more metros tie on weight they are all shown as co-leaders. Share is of the decade's total weight at metros with a worked-at record.

Decade	Leader	Share	Runner-up
1900s	Paris	16.7%	Berlin14.8%
1910s	Berlin	13.6%	Paris9.1%
1920s	Copenhagen and Paris(tied)	11.1% each	Göttingen9.3%
1930s	Berlin	11.1%	New York9.3%
1940s	New York	19.8%	Oxford and St. Louis7.9%
1950s	New York	17.8%	San Francisco-San Jose12.8%
1960s	Boston	13.9%	San Francisco-San Jose11.7%
1970s	New York	11.8%	Boston11.2%
1980s	Boston and San Francisco-San Jose(tied)	11.2% each	New York8.4%
1990s	Los Angeles	16.7%	Boston13.8%
2000s	San Francisco-San Jose and New York(tied)	9.1% each	Boston8.6%
2010s	San Francisco-San Jose and New York(tied)	9.0% each	Tokyo and Cambridge7.3%
2020s*	San Francisco-San Jose	14.3%	New York11.1%

* The 2020s cover 2020 to 2026 only.

2026

The 2026 Nobel science winners, from the place each was born to the place the work was done.

Francis Halzen
Nobel Physics
Born Tienen, Belgium → worked Madison, WI, USA
Georg Nagel
Nobel Physiology or Medicine
Born Weingarten, Germany → worked Würzburg, Germany
Henri B. Kagan
Nobel Chemistry
Born Boulogne-Billancourt, France → worked Orsay, France
Karl Deisseroth
Nobel Physiology or Medicine
Born Boston, MA, USA → worked Stanford, CA, USA
Kenso Soai
Nobel Chemistry
Born Hiroshima, Japan → worked Tokyo, Japan
Peter Hegemann
Nobel Physiology or Medicine
Born Münster, Germany → worked Berlin, Germany

Wider prizes, 2026: Gerd Faltings (Abel Prize, Lüdenscheid); Frank Merle (Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, Paris); Hong Wang (Fields Medal, Bures-sur-Yvette); Jacob Tsimerman (Fields Medal, Toronto); John Pardon (Fields Medal, Stanford); Yu Deng (Fields Medal); Kunihiro Hattori (Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, Tokyo); Takehisa Kitazawa (Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award); Michael Woodford (Nobel Economic Sciences, New York, NY); Robert E. Hall (Nobel Economic Sciences, Stanford, CA).

Born here, won there

Counts of laureates in the wider prize set whose birth metro and worked-at metro differ. Each person counts once.

Importers

Metros where the most laureates worked who were born elsewhere.

#	Metro	Laureates drawn in	Born here
1	Boston	131	30
2	San Francisco-San Jose	121	19
3	New York	119	133
4	Los Angeles	50	16
5	Chicago	45	41
6	Cambridge	42	8
7	Washington-Baltimore	36	27
8	London	32	41
9	New Haven	28	8
10	Paris	27	37
11	Oxford	24	3
12	Berlin	18	18

Exporters

Metros where the most laureates were born who won elsewhere.

#	Metro	Laureates sent out	Born here
1	New York	114	133
2	Chicago	37	41
3	London	34	41
4	Washington-Baltimore	24	27
5	Boston	22	30
6	Paris	19	37
7	Berlin	18	18
8	Philadelphia	17	19
9	Vienna	17	19
10	Moscow	16	19
11	Budapest	15	15
12	Los Angeles	15	16

From India to the world

15 science laureates born in India, by year, with where each did the work.

Who is counted

Born in present-day India, plus anyone born before 1947 in territory that is now Pakistan or Bangladesh, who is marked. The set is the wider science prize list, not the Nobel alone. A blank work place means no affiliation is on record.

Laureate	Prize	Year	Born	Worked
Ronald Ross	Nobel Physiology or Medicine	1902	Almora, India	Liverpool, United Kingdom
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman	Nobel Physics	1930	Tiruchirappalli, India	Calcutta, India
Rustom Jal Vakil	Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award	1957	Mumbai, India	not recorded
H. Gobind Khorana	Nobel Physiology or Medicine	1968	Raipur, India	Madison, WI, USA
Abdus Salam	Nobel Physics	1979	Jhang Maghiāna, Pakistanborn in British India	Trieste, Italy
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar	Nobel Physics	1983	Lahore, Pakistanborn in British India	Chicago, IL, USA
Amartya Sen	Nobel Economic Sciences	1998	Santiniketan, India	Cambridge, United Kingdom
Ravinder N. Maini	Crafoord Prize	2000	Ludhiana, India	South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Ravinder N. Maini	Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award	2003	Ludhiana, India	South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Sathamangalam Ranga Iyengar Srinivasa Varadhan	Abel Prize	2007	Chennai, India	New York City, United States
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan	Nobel Chemistry	2009	Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India	Cambridge, United Kingdom
Ashoke Sen	Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics	2012	Kolkata, India	not recorded
Akshay Venkatesh	Fields Medal	2018	Delhi, India	Stanford, United States
Abhijit Banerjee	Nobel Economic Sciences	2019	Mumbai, India	Cambridge, MA, USA
Shankar Balasubramanian	Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences	2022	Chennai, India	not recorded

Places are named as they are today.

Two measures of the shift

How often the work crossed a border, and how concentrated it was in a few cities.

Crossed a border, 1930s and 2020s

23.7% → 35.3%

Share of Nobel science winners who worked in a different country from the one they were born in: 9 of 38 in the 1930s (the lowest decade), 18 of 51 in the 2020s.

Top five metros, 1900s and 2020s

51.9% → 41.3%

Share of each decade’s prize weight held by its five leading metros. The peak was the 1990s, at 59.8%.

Distinct metros, 1900s and 2020s

21 → 31

Metros with at least one Nobel science prize row at a worked-at place. The 2020s are an incomplete decade, so its count is a floor.

Where these numbers come from16 Oct 2026

Each prize row is credited to the metro where the laureate worked when the prize was won. A row carries its tier weight (10 for Nobel) divided by the number of winners in that prize-year, the same rule as the Laurels boards, and decade shares use only rows with a worked-at metro. CORE is Nobel Physics, Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine; WIDER adds Nobel Economic Sciences, Fields, Abel, Turing, Wolf, Lasker (not Public Service), Breakthrough, Crafoord and Kyoto (not Arts and Philosophy).

Worked-at rule: a laureate is placed at the metro of their affiliation at the time of the award; where there is more than one affiliation, the first one that resolves to a city is used. Prizes won by an organisation are left out, as are rows with no worked-at metro (7 of 668 Nobel science rows), which is why the shares are of placed weight only.

Weight rule: a Nobel prize carries a tier weight of 10, divided equally among that year’s winners in the same prize, so a three-way share gives each winner a third. Decade leaders are the metros with the highest total weight; where weights tie, all tied metros are shown. Crossing a border means the worked-at country differs from the birth country.

Sources: the Nobel Prize API (nobelprize.org) for the Nobel prizes and Wikidata for birthplaces, affiliations and the other prizes. The 2020s are an incomplete decade. Data as of 2026-10-16.