India, Oct. 17 -- John J. Hopfield is a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2024 for his work on the foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. Interestingly, his seminal work on the subject was published 42 years ago in 1982. When Esther Duflo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, along with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer in 2019, she was only 47-year-old. Economists have had to wait for an average of 32 years after having done their seminal work to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

These anecdotal examples raise an interesting question. How long does it take for a path breaking scholarly work to win a Nobel Prize? Does this waiting period vary across disciplines? ...