I have been itching to try my hand at more ‘real world’ applications of python. A while back I made one amateurish attempt at comparing vegetable prices between organic and non-organic sources, I haven’t really but my analysis suffered from non-normalised comparisons. I got good data from the organic sources but I didn’t compare prices by weight which resulted in totally irrelevant results. I ditched this ‘real world’ problems for a few months until a post by a friend on Facebook got my brain whirring and my python fever going. The post was on the recent Nobel prize in Physics to two Russian-born physicists for studying graphene. I didn’t look up the physics because what really got me going was the question of ethnicity vs. number of Nobel prizes. I have been subjected to various forms of ‘Russian supremacy’, particularly in the avenue of Physics, that I was genuinely curious to find out if Russian-born physicists were indeed the top tier. A fun python script, which taught me a few tricks on text processing, gave the following result.
Number of Nobel Laureates for the winning countries
It turns out that American-born physicists trump the rest of the world. The second prize goes to the Germans, third to the British and finally, the fourth to Russians. About half of the unique set of countries have only produced a single Nobel laureate in Physics (grey line).
Some notes on the technical details: I assigned countries based on our current border demarcations and, I did include the John Bardeen win twice since they were two separate Nobel prizes. Also, if anyone is interested in doing similar studies on Nobel Laureates, the Nobel site has a really cool feature which allows you to generate lists of data with user-specified details about each winner.
