Background

Muslims, at 1.2 billion people are 19.6% of world’s population. The religion has been around since the 7th century for 1,400 years. Jews are estimated to be 14.1 million worldwide or 0.2% of the world’s population. Here is a comparison of winners of various Nobel Prizes for literature, chemistry, economics, medicine and peace, based on whether they were Muslim or Jewish.

Comparison

Muslim Nobel Prize winners:

Literature: 1988 Najib Mahfooz.

Peace: 1978 Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat; 1994 Yasser Arafat.

Chemistry: 1990 Elias James Corey; 1999 Ahmed Zewail.

Economics: (none)

Medicine: 1960 Peter Brian Medawar; 1998 Ferid Mourad.

Physics: (none)

Jewish Nobel Prize winners:

Literature: 1910 - Paul Heyse; 1927 - Henri Bergson; 1957 Albert Camus, 1958 - Boris Pasternak; 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon; 1966 - Nelly Sachs; 1976 - Saul Bellow; 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer; 1981 - Elias Canetti; 1987 - Joseph Brodsky; 1991 - Nadine Gordimer.

Peace: 1911 - Alfred Fried; 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser; 1968 - Rene Cassin; 1973 - Henry Kissinger; 1978 - Menachem Begin; 1986 - Elie Wiesel; 1994 - Shimon Peres; 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin.

Chemistry: 1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer; 1906 - Henri Moissan; 1910 - Otto Wallach; 1915 - Richard Willstaetter; 1918 - Fritz Haber; 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy; 1961 - Melvin Calvin; 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz; 1972 - William Howard Stein; 1977 - Ilya Prigogine; 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown; 1980 - Paul Berg; 1980 - Walter Gilbert; 1981 - Roald Hoffmann; 1982 - Aaron Klug; 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman; 1985 - Jerome Karle; 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach; 1988 - Robert Huber; 1989 - Sidney Altman; 1992 - Rudolph Marcus; 2000 - Alan J. Heeger.

Economics: 1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson; 1971 - Simon Kuznets; 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow; 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich; 1976 - Milton Friedman; 1978 - Herbert A. Simon; 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein; 1985 - Franco Modigliani; 1987 - Robert M. Solow; 1990 - Harry Markowitz; 1990 - Merton Miller; 1992 - Gary Becker; 1993 Rober Fogel;

Medicine: 1908 - Elie Metchnikoff; 1908 - Paul Erlich; 1914 - Robert Barany; 1922 - Otto Meyerhof;1930 - Karl Landsteiner; 1931 - Otto Warburg; 1936 - Otto Loewi; 1944 - Joseph Erlanger;1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser; 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain; 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller; 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein; 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman; 1953 - Hans Krebs;1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann; 1958 - Joshua Lederberg; 1959 - Arthur Kornberg; 1964 - Konrad Bloch; 1965 - Francois Jacob; 1965 - Andre Lwoff; 1967 - George Wald; 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg; 1969 - Salvador Luria; 1970 - Julius Axelrod; 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz; 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman; 1975 - David Baltimore; 1975 - Howard Martin Temin; 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg; 1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow; 1978 - Daniel Nathans; 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf; 1984 - Cesar Milstein; 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown; 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein; 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]; 1988 - Gertrude Elion; 1989 - Harold Varmus; 1991 - Erwin Neher; 1991 - Bert Sakmann; 1993 - Richard J. Roberts; 1993 - Phillip Sharp; 1994 - Alfred Gilman; 1995 - Edward B. Lewis.

Physics: 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson; 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann; 1921 - Albert Einstein; 1922 - Niels Bohr; 1925 - James Franck; 1925 - Gustav Hertz; 1943 - Gustav Stern; 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi; 1952 - Felix Bloch; 1954 - Max Born; 1958 - Igor Tamm; 1959 - Emilio Segre; 1960 - Donald A. Glaser; 1961 - Robert Hofstadter;1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau; 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman; 1965 - Julian Schwinger; 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann; 1971 - Dennis Gabor; 1973 - Brian David Josephson; 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson; 1976 - Burton Richter; 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias; 1978 - Peter L Kapitza; 1979 - Stephen Weinberg; 1979 - Sheldon Glashow; 1988 - Leon Lederman; 1988 - Melvin Schwartz; 1988 - Jack Steinberger;1990 - Jerome Friedman;1995 - Martin Perl.