Chicago is home to not only legendary athletes and artists, but also incredible minds.
That said, you probably never had a poster of Milton Friedman on your wall as a kid. So it’s a good time to catch up on the local names and their important work that have garnered worldwide recognition.
Sunday marks the annual Nobel Prize presentation ceremony. The award date, Dec. 10, is the anniversary of the 1896 death of Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, who established literature and science prizes in his will. The Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and literature are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, while the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway. Since 1969, an additional prize has been awarded at the ceremony in Stockholm — the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
And though Scandinavia might feel far removed from Chicago, our city has a wealth of Nobel laureates.
University of Chicago claims 99 Nobelists. Its most recent recipient, Douglas W. Diamond, was awarded last year with two other economists for their pioneering research on banks and financial crises. Northwestern University has three.
Then, there are those who achieved the honor either before or after their time here.
Enrico Fermi won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938, but that was before he moved to Chicago to birth the Atomic Age under a football stadium. Ernest Hemingway, who was born in Oak Park, won in 1954 while he was recuperating in Cuba after surviving two plane crashes.
Another notable Nobel: University of Chicago professor Robert E. Lucas Jr. won for economics in 1995 — just days before a divorce property settlement with his first wife was about to expire. She was legally owed half of the million-dollar prize.
And a notable Nobel exception: Edwin Hubble transformed our view of the universe, but the University of Chicago graduate never won a Nobel Prize for physics.
Some Nobel winners are just like normal, everyday people despite their impeccable credentials.
Merton H. Miller, the 1990 winner in economics, was looking for Mike Ditka at an October 1991 cocktail party honoring 18 Nobel laureates.
“I’m a notoriously fanatical Bears fan,” said Merton, a season-ticket holder since 1973. “You know, they’re having a brunch for the Nobel economics laureates Sunday and they asked if I could come. I said, ‘Are you crazy? That’s the day the Redskins are going to play (the Bears).’”
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1907: Albert A. Michelson Nobel Prize winning professor Albert A. Michelson of the University of Chicago in an undated photo. (University of Chicago)
The Nobel Prize in Physics
The first head of the physics department at the University of Chicago won the first Nobel Prize ever presented to an American (though he was born in Prussia). The U.S. Naval Academy graduate measured the speed of light with unsurpassed accuracy and built several machines for studying the length of light waves.
Michelson died at age 78 in Pasadena, Calif., where he continued to tinker with speed of light analysis.
Prize motivation: “For his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid.”
Rudyard Kipling was a fellow laureate in 1907. There was, however, no public ceremony due to the death of Sweden’s King Oscar II two days earlier.
1925: Charles Gates Dawes Charles Gates Dawes, circa 1924. (Chambers Studio)
The Nobel Peace Prize (shared with Sir Austen Chamberlain)
Dawes, who at the age of 32 had been the U.S. comptroller of currency, impressed many as a brigadier general in charge of supplying the United States Army in France during World War I. After the war, he made headlines again as the nation’s first budget director, saving as much as $300 million in his first year. But back in Europe, Germany was struggling to repay enormous reparations. For the U.S., Dawes was the natural go-to guy in 1924 — when he was elected vice president under Calvin Coolidge — to help broker a deal to stabilize Germany’s finances and figure out how the allies were to get their money. The result was called the Dawes Plan, and for it he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
A heart attack killed Dawes in 1951. His home is now the Evanston History Center.
Prize motivation: “For his crucial role in bringing about the Dawes Plan.”
The award was received by Laurits Selmer Swenson, U.S. minister in Oslo, in 1926.
Excerpt from acceptance speech: “This award, which is in recognition of the work of the First Committee of Experts, Reparation Commission, of which I was chairman, is gratefully acknowledged. The committee was composed of Owen D. Young, Sir Josiah C. Stamp, Sir Robert M. Kindersley, Jean Parmentier, Edgard Allix, Alberto Pirelli, Frederico Flora, Emile Francqui, Baron Maurice Houtart, and myself. It was the endeavor of the experts to found their plan upon the principles of justice, fairness, and mutual interest, relying for its acceptance thus prepared upon that common good faith which is the enduring hope for the universal safeguarding of peace. That the results achieved under it have merited in your judgment this high recognition is a tribute to the united efforts of the committee.”
1931: Jane Addams Jane Addams in Chicago, circa 1933. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)
The Nobel Peace Prize (shared with Nicholas Murray Butler)
Even those who recognize her name think of Addams simply as the founder of Hull House in Chicago in 1889 and the caretaker of the urban poor. They might not be aware of her highly unpopular international crusade for peace during World War I.
Her activities in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which she helped to found and served as its first president, influenced the judges to honor her.
[ At a time when immigrants were feared, Chicago’s Hull House nurtured the lives of the foreign-born ]
Addams did not attend the ceremony — she was hospitalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She died in 1935, but Hull House remained open until 2012. It now houses the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Prize motivation: “For their assiduous effort to revive the ideal of peace and to rekindle the spirit of peace in their own nation and in the whole of humanity.”
[ Why you should care about Jane Addams ]
Commentary by Addams: “For many years leading women of this country and of foreign countries have worked in the interest of peace between nations. For more than 15 years the women of America have worked for peace, and our ideas have spread until now there are peace league branches in twenty-six countries.”
1976: Saul Bellow Author Saul Bellow, center, leaves his home on Oct. 21, 1976, in Chicago. Bellow had won the Nobel Prize. (George Quinn/Chicago Tribune)
The Nobel Prize in Literature
The University of Chicago professor and author of “Dangling Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March,” “Herzog,” “Humboldt’s Gift” and more, was considered by many critics to be a great American novelist. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he was also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards and many other honors. Though born in Quebec, Bellow arrived in Chicago as a child, graduated from Northwestern and frequently set his novels in the city.
One Tribune review of Bellow’s work said, “He’s trying to turn the head inside out, as it were, by taking what goes on inside and making it sounds like what goes on outside.”
[ Walking through Saul Bellow's Chicago ]
Bellow became the seventh American to win a Nobel Prize in 1976 and the seventh American to win the literature category. He was frazzled the morning of the announcement, but the reason had nothing to do with the award — he was moving.
When asked what the award meant to him, Bellow responded: “It means I can stop thinking about recognition. Now I can think about more serious matters.”
Bellow died in Massachusetts at age 89 in 2005.
Prize motivation: “For the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”
[ Rick Kogan: The adventures of Nobel Prize-winning writer Saul Bellow come to ‘American Masters’ ]
Excerpt from Nobel lecture: “Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. If writers do not come again into the center it will not be because the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so wish.”
1976: Milton Friedman Dr. Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago economics professor, started Friday, Oct. 15, 1976, like any other day in his life. On Thursday, he was named a Nobel Prize winner while he was a speaker in Michigan. Coming home Friday was a day of honors and congratulations. He was constantly interrupted by phone calls, the glare of television lights, and accepted the good wishes from his friends across the country. (Hardy Wieting/Chicago Tribune)
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
With the possible exception of John Maynard Keynes, Friedman was the most influential economist of the 20th century, changing minds on everything from Federal Reserve policy to rent control. He was a founder of the “Chicago school” of free-market economics.
He made the case for the central importance of monetary policy in the performance of the economy and helped make the University of Chicago one of the premier places in the world to study economics.
[ Economics as a contact sport: When it comes to big ideas, U. of C. economists are regular guys who like to butt heads ]
Friedman and Bellow were colleagues at the time of their Nobel Prize announcements and their offices were in the same building.
“That Nobel Prizes for economics and literature should come in the same year to Chicagoans and members of the faculty of the University of Chicago is a signal distinction for this city,” the Tribune Editorial Board wrote in 1976.
Still, deliberations to ratify his award — normally a formality — lasted almost two hours. Some objected to his role as political adviser to Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. Others disapproved of “careless” commentaries in Friedman’s columns for Newsweek. Swedish leftists accused Friedman of assisting a military junta in Chile, but friends denied the economist acted as a consultant for its government.
“I was in Chile for six days a year and a half ago,” Friedman told reporters after the Nobel Prize announcement. “I gave public lectures, and I talked to officials. I have never been there before or since. I have no apologies for what I did.”
Friedman died in 2006. The Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics was established at the University of Chicago in his honor in 2008.
Prize motivation: “For his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.”
Excerpt from Nobel lecture: “Government policy about inflation and unemployment has been at the center of political controversy. Ideological war has raged over these matters. Yet the drastic change that has occurred in economic theory has not been a result of ideological warfare. It has not resulted from divergent political beliefs or aims It has responded almost entirely to the force of events: brute experience proved far more potent than the strongest of political or ideological preferences.”
1980: James Cronin Dr. James Cronin received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 for a 1964 experiment that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. (Ernie Cox Jr./Chicago Tribune)
The Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Val Fitch)
Cronin, whose father was a graduate student at the University of Chicago before he also attended the school then became a professor there, was awarded for work he and Fitch did at Princeton University and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York 15 years prior.
The two scientists studied subatomic particles, which are even smaller than atoms, and concluded that sometimes these particles formed matter (the stuff that we and the world are made of) and sometimes they dissolved into antimatter (the opposite).
That discovery — known as the Fitch-Cronin Effect — overturned a long-held theory that was considered a cornerstone of physics. But, at the same time, it also supported the “Big Bang” theory that the universe was created in a giant explosion.
“Any time you find a law of nature that shouldn’t be violated, you should take a look at it,” Cronin said. “It’s an open invitation for experiment.”
Cronin, who shared a birthday with fellow Nobel laureate and University of Chicago legend Fermi, died in 2016.
Prize motivation: “For the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons.”
Excerpt from presentation speech: “Suppose the TV-news suddenly reported one evening that visitors from outer space were planning to land on Earth; that the space travelers have radioed a demand for immediate information about the composition of the Earth. Does it consist of Matter or Antimatter? The answer to this question is one of life and death. The two kinds of matter are known to annihilate each other atom by atom. The space travelers claim, furthermore, that the nature of their own kind of matter was determined before leaving. What they now want to know is, whether the same tests have been made on Earth. Thanks to Cronin’s and Fitch’s discovery it is now possible to give them a clear-cut answer, so they can avoid a disastrous landing.”
1983: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, left, winner of the Nobel Prize, walks to work with his wife Lalitha from their home on Oct. 19, 1983, in Chicago. (Frank Hanes/Chicago Tribune)
The Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with William Alfred Fowler)
Fifty years prior, Chandrasekhar’s colleagues discounted his theory of the existence of white dwarfs, dying stars that collapse into bodies of extreme density and low light. The University of Chicago astrophysicist, who was a native of India but became a U.S. citizen in 1953, discovered white dwarfs while on a steamer ship en route from his home country to England in 1930. Astronomers, however, have since proven that white dwarfs are among the most common stars in the cosmos.
At the time of the award announcement, Chandrasekhar was more proud of his work on black holes, which are the remains of collapsed stars far larger than white dwarfs. Others praised his dedication to students. Chandrasekhar became the second person in his family to be named a Nobel laureate. His uncle, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, discovered a form of light-scattering known as the Raman effort, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1930.
[ The University of Chicago seems to get Nobel supply on demand ]
One university associate recalled that in the 1940s, Chandrasekhar drove to the campus from the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisc., to teach a class of only two students. Some wondered why he bothered.
Both students, Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee and Chen Ning Yang, shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1957.
Chandrasekhar died in 1995 at age 84.
Prize motivation: “For his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.”
Excerpt from speech at the Nobel banquet: “The award of a Nobel Prize carries with it so much distinction and the number of competing areas and discoveries are so many, that it must of necessity have a sobering effect on an individual who receives the Prize. For who will not be sobered by the realization that among the past Laureates there are some who have achieved a measure of insight into Nature that is far beyond the attainment of most? But I am grateful for the award since it is possible that it may provide a measure of encouragement to those, who like myself, have been motivated in their scientific pursuits, principally, for achieving personal perspectives, while wandering, mostly, in the lonely byways of Science.”
1988: Leon M. Lederman Leon M. Lederman, director of Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, on July 6, 1983. (John Bartley/Chicago Tribune)
The Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger)
The head of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia had news of his own to share the day of his Nobel Prize announcement: he was leaving the premier high-energy physics research center and home of the world’s most powerful atom smasher to tackle the nation’s “frightening” level of science illiteracy by becoming a professor at, you guessed it, the University of Chicago.
Lederman played a key role in the creation of the Illinois Science and Mathematics Academy in Aurora. He also set up a program of Saturday morning physics classes at Fermilab.
“If parents are uncomfortable with science, then their children are going to be uncomfortable, too,” he said. “If college graduates who go into teaching are uncomfortable with science, so will their students be uncomfortable.”
[ Enthusiasm squared: The pied piper of physics, Nobel laureate Lederman won't be happy until everyone is comfortable with science ]
Lederman and his colleagues were awarded for their successful search for the universe’s so-called “ghost” particles, the muon neutrino.
He once called the particle “barely a fact” because it had no electric charge or measurable mass, and it traveled at the speed of light and could pass through 100 million miles of steel without touching a single atom. Yet its discovery in 1961, when the three Noble laureates were researchers at Columbia University, showed that nature is much simpler than anyone had thought.
What began as a conversation among them during a coffee break opened up an era that showed all matter and energy in the universe appear to be made up of two fundamental families of particles: quarks and leptons.
“The prize, I think, was for the fact that not only did we discover a neutrino, but that neutrino turned out to be extremely useful as a tool in studying and elucidating the properties of particles,” Lederman said.
Lederman used the prize money to buy a log cabin near the tiny town of Driggs in eastern Idaho as a vacation retreat.
The couple moved there full-time in 2011 when Leon Lederman started experiencing memory loss problems that became more severe, his wife told the AP. His Nobel Prize sold for $765,000 in an auction in 2015 to help pay for medical bills and care.
Lederman died at age 96 in 2018.
Prize motivation: “For the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.”
Excerpt from speech at Nobel banquet: “We are honored for research which is today referred to as the ‘Two Neutrino Experiment.’ How does one make this research comprehensible to ordinary people? In fact ‘The Two Neutrinos’ sounds like an Italian dance team. How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick? This is a dilemma and an anguish for all scientists because the public understanding of science is no longer a luxury of cultural engagement, but it is an essential requirement for survival in our increasingly technological age: In this context, I believe this Nobel Ceremony with its awesome tradition and pomp has as one of its most important benefits; the public attention it draws to science and its practitioners.
“Today, twenty-six years after the ‘Two Neutrino Experiment,’ the subject of particle physics with its modest goal of understanding the universe, dances with excitement and anticipations.”
1998: John Pople John A. Pople, center, celebrates his 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Lawrence B. Dumans, Provost for Northwestern University, left, and Eric J. Sundquist on Oct. 14, 1998. (Charles Cherney/Chicago Tribune)
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Walter Kohn)
At 72, the Northwestern chemistry professor and British citizen who developed the GAUSSIAN computer program in 1970, shared the prize for using mathematics to unscramble the complexities of how atoms glom onto one another to form molecules.
His mathematical models are used in every discipline that relies on chemistry, from predicting the weather to testing drugs. Without ever touching a test tube, scientists can study chemical reactions on a computer chugging through Pople’s arcane equations.
Pople’s daughter, Hilary, told the Tribune the family always knew his work was important and special.
“He always had pads of paper with numbers written on them, all the time, that none of us could understand,” she said.
Pople was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 and died of liver cancer the following year at 78.
Prize motivation: “For his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.”
Excerpt from Nobel lecture: “Starting in mathematics, using fundamental principles of physics, aided by developing power of computer science I have seen the expansion of theory in many branches of chemistry and biology. Increasingly, science is being unified.”
2000: James J. Heckman James J. Heckman, named one of the 2000 Nobel Prize winners in economics, laughs after a news conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Oct. 11, 2000. (Douglas Engle/AP)
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (shared with Daniel McFadden)
The University of Chicago economist was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, attending a conference when his hotel phone rang.
“It was a Swedish accent,” he recalled. “So it sounded good.”
The call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized Heckman, who was known on campus for his endless energy and curiosity, for applying mathematical logic to politically explosive issues.
For example: Do affirmative action programs work? Do job training classes make a difference? Is it worth the effort to get a GED?
Often his answers challenged conventional wisdom.
Heckman spent his first year of graduate school at the University of Chicago, then failed the university’s “preliminary exam” that allows students to continue.
Instead of retaking the test, Heckman headed to Princeton, where he finished both his master’s and doctoral degrees in economics by 1971. He became a faculty member at the University of Chicago in 1973 and is the director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development.
Prize motivation: “For his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples.”
Excerpt from Nobel lecture: “The field will continue to flourish if it renews itself by tackling new econometric problems that arise from new problems in economics. It will die if it seeks only to refine the original models that launched the field.”
2009: Barack Obama Nobel peace Prize laureate and US President Barack Obama poses with his medal and diploma during the Nobel Peace prize award ceremony in Oslo on Dec. 10, 2009. (Bjorn Sigurdson/Getty-AFP)
The Nobel Peace Prize
Just 11 months after he celebrated his election as president in Grant Park and 9 months after his inauguration, Obama became a Nobel laureate. He was the fourth U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the third to do so while in office (the other two were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson).
The bestowal of one of the world’s top accolades on Obama, who had yet to score a major foreign policy success, was greeted with gasps from the audience at the announcement ceremony in Oslo, Reuters reported.
Obama, as if accepting the unusual circumstance of the award, accepted it “as a call to action” rather than a reward for accomplishments.
[ As the political stages got bigger for Barack Obama on the way to a historic presidency, so did the size of the rooms he commanded in his adopted city. ]
“The gold medallion given to recipients of the prize does not come with a ribbon, but the award could end up being a weight around Obama’s neck,” the Tribune wrote following the announcement. “Intended to honor how Obama has altered the nation’s diplomatic direction, the peace prize is likely to call attention to how much of the administration’s agenda — from closing Guantánamo Bay to winding down the war in Iraq — remains undone.”
Daughter Malia later lumped the news with the family’s dog: “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize and it’s Bo’s birthday.”
“It’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective,” Obama told reporters.
He was re-elected in 2012 and left office in 2017. The Obama Foundation “helps people turn hope into action — to inspire, empower and connect them to change their world.” Construction on the Obama Presidential Center continues in Jackson Park.
[ Obama Foundation has its best fundraising year yet, with assets near $1 billion ]
Prize motivation: “For his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Excerpt from Nobel lecture: “I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations — that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.
“And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I.
“But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.
“Still, we are at war, and I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.”
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