Data on great innovators

A wealth of biographical information is available for Nobel Prize winners. The most useful immediate
source is the official website of the Nobel Foundation, nobelprize.org. This website provides
lists and written biographies of all winners, and was used to obtain dates and locations of birth,
the field of the prize, the year and location of the highest educational degree, and the year(s) in
which the prize-winning research was performed. Altogether, I was able to determine dates of
birth for 547 of the 564 Nobel Prize winners (97.0%), and the period of key research for all but 3
of these. The period of key research was usually straightforward to ascertain, although for 30% of
the prizewinners it spans multiple years, in which case the apparent initial and final years of the
key research were collected.