The Nobel Prizes. Love them? Hate them? Are they still relevant, meaningful? Go on admit it, you always imagined you would win one day.

Whatever you think of them, the 2015 results are in. What’s more, the good people of the Nobel Foundation offer us free access to data via an API. I’ve published a document over at RPubs, showing some of the ways to access and analyse their data using R. Just to get you started:

library(jsonlite)
u     <- "http://api.nobelprize.org/v1/laureate.json"
nobel <- fromJSON(u)

In this post, just the highlights. Click the images for larger versions.

1. Gender

There’s a gender gap in Nobel awards to say the least.

In some categories, awards to women have increased in recent years.

2. Age

Laureates are in general rather old, with notable exceptions.

Laureates in most fields are getting older

3. Nationality

The US has many winners; but are the absolute numbers meaningful?

Migration of Nobel laureates; many roads lead to the USA

For more details and more charts, visit the document at RPubs.