Ig Nobel Prize
satiric science award
The Ig Nobel Prize (), also known as the Ig Nobels or simply the Igs, is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to promote public engagement with scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". The award parodies the Nobel Prize and is named after Ignatius Nobel, a fictional cousin of the Nobel Prize's founder, Alfred Nobel. The name is also a pun on the word ignoble. Most awards are for genuine scientific achievements with an unorthodox, obvious or humorous slant, while other awards are given ironically to various politicians, media figures, or promoters of pseudoscience.
Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded in 10 categories each year, presented by Nobel laureates in a ceremony that was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Harvard University until 2026, when the ceremony was moved to Zurich, Switzerland, due to safety concerns about international visitors entering the United States. The winners deliver 60-second acceptance speeches, and receive a low-quality home-made prize.
The ceremony contains a number of whimsical events and running jokes, including throwing paper planes onto the stage, competing to win a date with a Nobel laureate, and the "24/7" lectures where winners summarize their research in 24 seconds, then in seven words.
History
The Ig Nobels were created in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, then editor-in-chief of the Journal of Irreproducible Results and later co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), who has been the master of ceremonies at all awards. The prize is named after the fictional Ignatius Nobel, inventor of the soda pop and distant cousin of Alfred Nobel, who founded the Nobel Prize, which the Ig Nobels parody.
“Ig Nobel Prize” enters the record as satiric science award. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nobel, Prize and satiric can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q184253. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ig Nobel Prize” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.