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Nobel Prize: Alfred Nobel
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The Norwegian Parliament appoints the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects the Laureate for the Peace Prize. The Committee chairman, currently Dr. Ole Danbolt Mjøs, awards the Prize itself. At the time of Alfred Nobel's death Sweden and Norway were in a personal union in which the Swedish government was solely responsible for foreign policy, and the Norwegian Parliament was responsible only for Norwegian domestic policy. Alfred Nobel never explained[3] why he wanted a Norwegian rather than Swedish body to award the Peace Prize. As a consequence, many people have speculated about Nobel's intentions. For instance, Nobel may have wanted to prevent the manipulation of the selection process by foreign powers, and as Norway did not have any foreign policy, the Norwegian government could not be influenced.
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The Economics prize was not part of Alfred Nobel's original will, being instituted in 1968 at the tercentenary of the Bank of Sweden. The first prize was awarded in 1969. The award is designed to be given according to the same principles and rules as the five original Nobel prizes - Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. The prizes reward specific achievements rather than "outstanding persons". Indeed the statutes prescribe that "the Prize shall be awarded annually to a person who has carried out work in economic science of the eminent significance expressed in the Will of Alfred Nobel drawn up on November 27, 1895".
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There is an urban legend that Nobel refused to endow a mathematics prize after his wife had an affair with the mathematician Mittag-Leffler. This story is false as Alfred Nobel never actually married.[17]
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The Nobel prize for literature is the highest international literary honor. First awarded in 1901, it is one of the prizes established by Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a 19th-century Swedish industrialist (see Nobel, Alfred; Nobel Prizes).
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Alfred Nobel , a Swedish chemist and engineer, invented dynamite. It brought him great wealth, but it ... brought him feelings of guilt for having created such a deadly material. To help ease his conscience, he arranged, two weeks before his death in 1896, to leave his fortune to "those persons who shall have contributed most materially to the benefit of mankind during the year immediately preceding."
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Alfred Nobel established prizes for fields of endeavor that interested him, and mathematics simply wasn't among them. Nobel had performed some excellent development work in physics and chemistry, he had wide-ranging literary interests, and — most importantly — he was an idealist who wanted to reward those who did "most or best for the fraternization of peoples or abolition or diminishing of standing armies, and for creation or propagation of peace congresses." (In fact, Nobel's original will had provided for only a single prize, which he especially desired would be given to those "who through writing and actions can succeed in fighting the strange prejudices which both nations and governments still have against the creation of a European peace tribunal.") But other than as a necessary foundation for chemistry and physics, mathematics was not a particular interest of Nobel's.
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