Countries Ranked by Population to "Intellectual" Nobel Prize Ratio

This investigates whether there was a correlation between number of intellectual Nobel Prizes won by a country and the average IQ score of that country. For a proper comparison, the population of each country was divided by the number of Nobel Prizes it had gotten. The only Nobel Prizes excluded from the count were the Peace Prizes. Strictly speaking, the correlation was calculated on the ranks of the countries on the IQ and Nobel Prize lists. The Spearman Rank Order Correlation (r) came out to be 0.258046 with a p of 0.2462680. The correlation is not significant (at p<0.05). And if it were, it would only explain 6.7% (r squared) of the Nobel Prize winning rank. See below for a chart of the nobel prizes per country and a graph showing the lack of correlation with IQ rank.

• Most of the population data (in thousands) are from the World Almanac and Book of Facts 2000 (for 1999) Mahwah, New Jersey: PRIMEDIA Reference, 1999.
• The Nobel Prize data was tallied from the World Almanac and Book of Facts 1999 and from http://www.nobel.se/index.html.
• There was sometimes more than one country listed for a Nobel Prize Winner—each country got credit.
• The population data for the USSR is from 1980.

Nobel Laureates search at Amazon.com

The results of the poll on the correlation of national IQs with Nobel Prizes