Whatever else you might think, the comparison of Nobel prizes and populations is pretty interesting. The world's Nobel prize winners are humanity's most important contributors in terms of advancing science and knowledge and peace and all the things that we, as a race, deem valuable. The list unfairly doesn't go far enough back for Muslims though: they have a few more winners than that, prior to the earliest date in the above list. Not many more, but hey.

Makes me wonder how many German and Irish Nobel Peace Prize winners there have been (that's my primary ethnicity, German/Irish). I'm sure there are a fair number of Germans, but I haven't a clue as to how many Irish winners there have been.