Manchester University has overtaken Oxford and Cambridge at the number of Nobel laureates

The University of Manchester now has a growing number of staff who received the Nobel prize than any other University in the UK. Last week, the University is proud that its walls are 4 of the winner, awarded with the most prestigious prize in the world. This is a unique case in the history of British higher education. For the first time the provincial red-brick University has among its staff more Nobel laureates than Oxford, which now there is none, and Cambridge, which are two of the winner.

The awarding of the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of two-dimensional graphene Andrey Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of Manchester University brought the leaders of British education. Besides them the University has two other Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, awarded the Nobel Committee in 2001 for economic research, and sir John Salston, who received the prize in medicine and physiology in 2002. Joseph Stiglitz now heads the Institute for the study of world poverty im Brooks (Brooks World Poverty Institute), and John Salston – Manchester Institute for science, ethics and innovation (Manchester's Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation).

Achieve the University of Manchester was not accidental. It was founded by local Industrialists in 1824 as the mechanics Institute, and was originally conceived as an educational institution, teaching, local production masters of the scientific principles needed in a new era of industrial machines. In its laboratories began their experiments that led to the discovery of splitting the atom, Ernest Rutherford. Here sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron, and Alan Turing laid the foundations of a modern computer. Now, with the annals of its history, 25 Nobel laureates, the University of Manchester, although it continues to lag behind Oxford by their total number, but ahead of such countries as Austria, China, India and Hungary.

October 15, 2010

Prepared on materials of the newspaper "The Independent".