Higgs shared his prize – Edinburgh University's first Nobel for physics – with François Englert, a Belgian who arrived at the same theory almost simultaneously in 1964.
But it shouldn't be taken too seriously, especially when one recalls that the very first Nobel for Literature, in 1901, the award that set the modern prize train in motion, was won by, er, Sully Prudhomme.
In 1911, Curie, now widowed, won a second Nobel (for discovering radium) which the award committee then tried to rescind when news emerged of her affair with her married colleague Paul Langevin.
Mo Yan, China's first Nobel laureate for literature, has been greeted with some extraordinary hostility in the west.
One of the very first Nobel prizes, for 1905, went to the fantastically named Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicita von Suttner, née Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau, a pacifist who had been one of Alfred Nobel's friends, and briefly his secretary.
Emile Zola is writing Travail (published the following year when his compatriot, Sully Prudhomme, was to win the first Nobel prize for literature) but has turned his hand to photographing the Universal Exhibition, the event that will capture the spirit of the new century and France's idea of itself as the cultural, innovative and inspiring centre of the new world.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the first Nobel laureate to receive the prize for his work on the pancreas, among other things.
Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first Nobel prize awarded in recognition of astronomical research.
When the first Nobel Prizes were presented on Dec. 10, 1901, the award for economics wasn't one of them.
The first Nobel prize in medicine, awarded in 1901, went to Emil von Behring for discovering how to employ antitoxins, as he called them, to treat diphtheria.
The first Nobel laureate upon appointment.
