CUE Research · Study 5

Every Nobel Laureate

Nearly a thousand people awarded a Nobel Prize since 1901, by prize.

The question: Do the people behind the greatest discoveries and works share numbers, signs or birthdays?

What stands out

No clear differences. Across every group of 50 or more and every measure, the numbers are within what chance produces.

Worth watching, not enough to claim

  • Chinese sign

    Peace: Ox appears 17 times against about 8.8 expected (1.94×).

  • Sun sign

    Physics: Capricorn appears only 7 times against about 17.8 expected.

  • Sun sign

    Medicine: Gemini appears 30 times against about 19.3 expected (1.56×).

  • Life Path

    Chemistry: Life Path 9 appears 32 times against about 21.1 expected (1.51×).

All laureates: every birth quarter is within normal variation of random birthdays from the same years.

All laureates Expected, random birthdays 1817–1997 Clear difference Worth watching

Context What explains it

Nobel laureates are a useful control. There is no age cut-off in science or literature that would favour a birth month, so any clear pattern here would need another explanation.

Laureates were born over more than 150 years, so the baseline for each prize uses that prize’s own birth years.

Source The data

  • Nobel Prize laureates, 1901–2025. Retrieved 2026-09-27. View source
  • Every person awarded a Nobel Prize or the Prize in Economic Sciences, from the Nobel Foundation’s own data. People awarded twice are counted once. Organisations are not included.
  • Verification: 954 of 990 included. A date is used when the Nobel Foundation and Wikidata (the item the Foundation links to) agree to the day.
  • Expected values: every day of the years each group was born in, weighted by how many people were born in each year, run through CUE’s engine. Weighting matters for Chinese signs and Life Paths, which depend on the year.
  • A difference is called clear only in groups of 50 or more and at least three standard errors from expected. Because each study tests about a hundred values, a clear difference needs 3.5 standard errors; 2.5 to 3.5 is only “worth watching”.

Reproduce it: the raw data snapshots and build scripts are in CUE’s code repository (scripts/data and scripts/build-*-study.mts).

Further reading

  • Nobel Foundation, Nobel Prize data (api.nobelprize.org)