With the announced award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature to Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer, a total of 8 Swedes have won the award in the 110 years of its history. Yet that percentage is not as impressive as another statistic. Twenty-five percent of all Nobel Prize laureates are Jewish while the world’s Jewish population is less than one quarter of one percent. The numbers are even more disproportionate when it comes to science-related awards.
