The Nobel check: no laureate of Fort Wayne's

1901 — the present

No winner of a Nobel Prize, in any of the six categories, was born in Fort Wayne, raised in Fort Wayne, lived in Fort Wayne, or worked in Fort Wayne. The check was run three ways: the laureate rosters read by birthplace, the biography of every laureate carrying an Indiana tie of any kind read for its actual city, and the Peace roster — the category named when the question was asked — read on its own. Indiana has laureates. None of them is this city's, and the nearest of them show how the answer was reached.

Seven laureates were born in Indiana, each in a different Indiana city, none of them Fort Wayne: Harold C. Urey of Walkerton (Chemistry, 1934); Wendell M. Stanley of Ridgeville (Chemistry, 1946); Paul A. Samuelson of Gary (Economic Sciences, 1970); Philip W. Anderson of Indianapolis (Physics, 1977); Ferid Murad of Whiting (Physiology or Medicine, 1998); Joseph E. Stiglitz of Gary (Economic Sciences, 2001); and Richard R. Schrock of Berne (Chemistry, 2005). Schrock's Berne, in Adams County some thirty miles southeast, is the closest a laureate's birthplace comes to Fort Wayne; he was raised in California. Three more laureates won while working in Indiana, all at universities in other Indiana cities: Hermann J. Muller took the 1946 prize in Physiology or Medicine on the faculty of Indiana University at Bloomington, and Elinor Ostrom took the 2009 prize in Economic Sciences there; Herbert C. Brown (1979) and Ei-ichi Negishi (2010) won in Chemistry from Purdue, at West Lafayette. In the Peace category the answer is emptier still: no Peace laureate has been a native of Indiana at all. Fort Wayne's factories and laboratories — General Electric, Magnavox, the Farnsworth works — employed thousands of able scientists and engineers across the twentieth century, and no Nobel came out of them. That is the finding, printed plainly because the question was asked plainly.

Sources:

1. NobelPrize.org, laureate facts pages and prize rosters by category — including Ferid Murad's curriculum vitae (born Whiting, Indiana, 14 September 1936) and Hermann J. Muller's facts page (affiliation at the time of the 1946 award: Indiana University, Bloomington).
2. The published rosters of American Nobel laureates by birthplace — Urey (Walkerton), Stanley (Ridgeville), Samuelson and Stiglitz (Gary), Anderson (Indianapolis), Schrock (Berne).
3. Indiana University and Purdue University records of their laureates — Muller and Ostrom at Bloomington; Brown and Negishi at West Lafayette.