Or the “fatal affair”
Since 1901, prizes financed from Alfred Nobel’s fortune have been awarded to people whose work was judged to have brought great benefit to humankind. Nobel explicitly named the areas in his will: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and work for peace.
Mathematics — for many the queen of the sciences — is absent. More than a century after the first Nobel Prizes, this has continued to invite stories about Nobel’s supposed dislike of mathematics. Legends then search for a decisive personal event that might explain that dislike.
One version can be dismissed quickly: Nobel’s wife could not have betrayed him with a mathematician because Nobel was never married. But perhaps, the story continues, it was a lover rather than a wife?
In the late 1880s Nobel knew the mathematician Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya. He is sometimes said to have courted her unsuccessfully, but there is no established evidence of the dramatic affair required by the legend. Nevertheless, a persistent story claims that Nobel omitted mathematics because Kovalevskaya had left him for another mathematician, Gösta Mittag-Leffler. Since Mittag-Leffler might then have become a candidate for a mathematics prize, Nobel supposedly wished to deny a rival that honour.
The problem is that the romantic chain of events is not supported by the necessary evidence. No secure love triangle of Nobel, Kovalevskaya and Mittag-Leffler is established simply because the story is entertaining.
It is also wrong to infer that no mathematician has ever received a Nobel Prize. Mathematicians have been laureates in other categories. John Nash, for example, received the 1994 prize in economic sciences for work in game theory.
Why the legend is attractive
The absence of a mathematics prize is a real fact. The alleged affair supplies a vivid motive. This is a typical environment for myth formation: an unanswered “why?” is filled by a story with jealousy, betrayal and revenge. A memorable explanation is then repeated more readily than an admission that the historical reasons are less dramatic or not completely documented.
Note on Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850–1891): Her name appears in many transliterations, including Sofia or Sophie Kovalevskaia and Kovalevskaya. A famous biographical anecdote tells that, during renovation of her childhood home, pages from lecture notes on differential and integral calculus were used as makeshift wallpaper in her room. The mysterious mathematical symbols fascinated her before she could understand them. The final qualification matters: fascination is not the same as miraculous childhood comprehension.