6 Youngest Nobel Prize Winners

6. Paul Dirac

Age: 31

Date of Birth: August 8^th, 1902

Award: Nobel Prize in Physics, 1933

Beginning our list, it’s the eminent physicist Paul Dirac, who was born in Bristol, UK. Dirac, a contemporary of Albert Einstein, was just 31 when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for ‘the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory’. During his long and successful career, he also won the Royal Medal, the Max Planck Medal and the Copley Medal. Known for his precise and sometimes unpredictable nature, his colleagues at Cambridge University regularly joked about his slow conversational speed, remarking that he sometimes took a good hour to complete a sentence. Nevertheless, his peer Albert Einstein admired his work greatly, although he also acknowledged his difficulties, famously commenting that ‘this balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.’ He is pictured below (in the very centre) with Einstein, at a Physics Conference in 1927.