List of nonreligious Nobel laureates


This list of nonreligious Nobel laureates comprises laureates of the Nobel Prize who have self-identified as atheist, agnostic, freethinker, or otherwise nonreligious at some point in their lives.
Many of these laureates earlier identified with a religion. In an estimate by Baruch Shalev, between 1901 and 2000, about 10.5% of all laureates, and 35% of those in literature, fall in this category. According to the same estimate, between 1901 and 2000, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers won 8.9% of the prizes in medicine, 7.1% in chemistry, 5.2% in economics, 4.7% in physics, and 3.6% in peace. Alfred Nobel himself was an atheist later in life.
Shalev's book lists many Jewish atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers as religiously Jewish. For example, Milton Friedman, Roald Hoffmann, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Élie Metchnikoff, and Rita Levi-Montalcini are listed as religiously Jewish; however, while they were ethnically and perhaps culturally Jewish, they did not believe in a God and self-identified as atheists.

Physics

YearLaureateReference
2000Zhores Alferov
2024Geoffrey Everest Hinton
1977Philip Warren Anderson
1956, 1972John Bardeen
1967Hans Bethe
1948Patrick Blackett
1981Nicolaas Bloembergen
1922Niels Bohr
1946Percy Williams Bridgman
1929Louis de Broglie
1935James Chadwick
1903Marie Curie
1903Pierre Curie
1933Paul Dirac
1921Albert Einstein
1938Enrico Fermi
1965Richard Feynman
1980Val Logsdon Fitch
1925James Franck
1969Murray Gell-Mann
2002Riccardo Giacconi
1973Ivar Giaver
2003Vitaly Ginzburg
1979Sheldon Glashow
2005Roy J. Glauber
2004David J. Gross
1945Wolfgang Pauli
2012Serge Haroche
2013Peter Higgs
2002Masatoshi Koshiba
2016J. Michael Kosterlitz
2000Herbert Kroemer
1962Lev Landau
1988Leon M. Lederman
2019Michel Mayor
1907Albert A. Michelson
2010Konstantin Novoselov
2019Jim Peebles
1926Jean Baptiste Perrin
2019Didier Queloz
1944Isidor Isaac Rabi
2011Brian Schmidt
1933Erwin Schrödinger
1956William Shockley
1988Jack Steinberger
1958Igor Tamm
2017Kip Thorne
1910Johannes Diderik van der Waals
1999Martinus J. G. Veltman
1979Steven Weinberg
1963Eugene Wigner
2020Roger Penrose

Chemistry

YearLaureateReference
1903Svante Arrhenius
1997Paul D. Boyer
1975John Cornforth
1911Marie Curie
1935Frédéric Joliot-Curie
1935Irène Joliot-Curie
1985Herbert A. Hauptman
1981Roald Hoffmann
1996Harold W. Kroto
1987Jean-Marie Lehn
1978Peter D. Mitchell
1994George Andrew Olah
1909Wilhelm Ostwald
1954Linus Pauling
1962Max Perutz
1958Frederick Sanger
2011Dan Shechtman
2018George Smith
1993Michael Smith
1934Harold Urey

Physiology or Medicine

YearLaureateReference
1970Julius Axelrod
1914Robert Bárány
1958George Beadle
1989J. Michael Bishop
2002Sydney Brenner
1962Francis Crick
1974Christian de Duve
1945Howard Florey
1906Camillo Golgi
1929Frederick Gowland Hopkins
1963Andrew Huxley
1965François Jacob
2003Paul Lauterbur
1907Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran
1986Rita Levi-Montalcini
1960Sir Peter Medawar
1908Élie Metchnikoff
1965Jacques Monod
1946Hermann Joseph Muller
2001Paul Nurse
1904Ivan Pavlov
1993Richard J. Roberts
2017Michael Rosbash
2002John Sulston
1937Albert Szent-Györgyi
1973Nikolaas Tinbergen
1967George Wald
1962James Watson

Economics

YearLaureateReference
1976Milton Friedman
1994John Harsanyi
1974Friedrich Hayek
1994John Forbes Nash, Jr.
1994Reinhard Selten
1998Amartya Sen
1978Herbert A. Simon

Peace

YearLaureateReference
1933Norman Angell
1908Klas Pontus Arnoldson
1990Mikhail Gorbachev
1962Linus Pauling
1995Joseph Rotblat
1975Andrei Sakharov
1986Elie Wiesel
1973Lê Đức Thọ

Literature

YearLaureateReference
1969Samuel Beckett
1903Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1957Albert Camus
1997Dario Fo
1932John Galsworthy
1991Nadine Gordimer
1971Pablo Neruda
1936Eugene O'Neill
2005Harold Pinter
1950Bertrand Russell
1998José Saramago
1964Jean-Paul Sartre
1925George Bernard Shaw
1986Wole Soyinka
1962John Steinbeck
1996Wisława Szymborska
2018Olga Tokarczuk
2000Gao Xingjian