1. The inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were bitter rivals who each refused to share the prize or to accept it if the other recieved it first. In November 1915 it was reported they had won the Nobel Prize for Physics but, in fact, neither received the award

2. When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the German pacifist journalist Carl von Ossietzky in 1936, who was at that point imprisoned in a concentration camp, Hitler ordered that no German could receive a Nobel Prize. Consequently, the German prize-winners Richard Kuhn (Chemistry, 1938); Adolf Butenandt (Chemistry 1939) and Gerhard Domagk (Medicine, 1939) were all prevented from accepting the Nobel Prize

3. Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a member of the Swedish parliament in 1939. The nomination was withdrawn shortly after

4. In 1958 Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, was prevented from accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature by the government of the Soviet Union

5. Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 on the grounds that it was incompatible with his role as a writer

6. In 1973 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho and the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The international reaction was critical, and two of the Nobel committee members resigned. Le Duc Tho refused the prize on the grounds that peace was not yet a reality for Vietnam

7. In 1999 the writer David Stoll revealed that the 1992 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rigoberta Menchú, had lied in her autobiography. The committee decided not to strip her of her prize, saying that the revelation was irrelevant

8. The Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was awarded the shared Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 with the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and the then Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for his role in the Oslo peace accords. Many in Israel felt that Mr Rabin had betrayed his country by giving away land and contributing to Jewish deaths

9. In 1998 the Nobel Prize for Medicine went to a scientist whose work led to the discovery of Viagra

10. There was an outcry in the world of science in 2007 when the former US Vice-President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for raising awareness on climate change. Critics argued that he was not a scientist and that he did not understand climate change

Souces: Times data, BBC, Nobel Foundation

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