EVERY year since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace.
Instituted by the final will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and industrialist, who was the inventor of the high explosive dynamite, the prize is an international award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden.
As the 2009 award winners are announced each day this week, we look at 10 of the most famous winners in the history of the prize.
King was an American activist and prominent leader in the African-American civil rights movement.
He secured progress on civil rights in the United States and is frequently referenced as a human rights icon today.
In 1964, he became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.
Born in Germany, this remarkable man rose to become the most prominent scientist of his day and arguably the most well known scientist of the last two hundred years, and is seen as the father of modern physics.
A theoretical physicist, his numerous contributions to the discipline include the special and general theories of relativity, culminating in perhaps the best known equation of all time, E = mc2.
He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".
Curie was a physicist and chemist, and became a pioneer in the field of radioactivity.
Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, picking up the award for Physics in 1903.
She was also the first person honoured with two Nobel Prizes, and is one of only two people who have been awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields, the second came in 1911 for Chemistry.
A Scottish biologist and pharmacologist, Fleming published many articles on bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy.
His best-known achievements are the discovery of the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the antibiotic substance penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum in 1928 - for this he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.
- Francis Crick, James D Watson, and Maurice Wilkins
Controversial winners of a Nobel prize, in 1953 James D. Watson and Francis Crick suggested what is now accepted as the first correct double-helix model of DNA structure.
Also active in the field at the time was Maurice Wilkins analysis and in vivo B-DNA X-ray patterns also supported the presence in vivo of the double-helical DNA configurations as proposed by Crick and Watson for their double-helix molecular model of DNA.
In 1962, after Franklin's death, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Unfortunately, Nobel rules of the time allowed only living recipients, but a vigorous debate continues on who should receive credit for the discovery.
Muller was an American geneticist, educator, and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (X-ray mutagenesis).
In 1946, Muller was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, "for the discovery that mutations can be induced by x-rays", this led to him becoming known for outspoken political beliefs later in his life as his work and fight against nuclear war entered the public conscious.
- Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
An Austrian theoretical physicist who achieved fame for his contributions to quantum mechanics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1933.
In 1935, after extensive correspondence with personal friend Albert Einstein, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, which ensured his name would go down in psychology folklore.
In 2003, Swansea-born Granger was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences committee recognized that Granger (and co-winner, long-time UC San Diego colleague, Robert F. Engle) had made fundamental discoveries in the analysis of time series data, and that this work was widely known fundamentally to have changed the way economists analyse financial and macroeconomic data.
One of the small number of Welsh Nobel laureates, he enjoyed a distinguished career as a respected economist on both sides of the Atlantic, and was voted one of the 100 Welsh heroes in 2004.
He was knighted in 2005, and died earlier this year.
In 1964, Sartre, a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, literary critic was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it.
He was the first Nobel Laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, which was announced on 22 October 1964; on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread.
Kipling was a British author and poet best known for his works of fiction such as The Jungle Book and Kim, and his poems, including Mandalay and If.
In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for "the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author".
Kipling was the first English language recipient, and to date he remains its youngest recipient at 42.
Do you have a favourite Nobel Prize winner? Add them to our list by leaving a comment below.