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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andre Geim | 3/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:44:34.349905+00:00 | kb-cron |
On 5 October 2010, Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene". Upon hearing of the award he said, "I'm fine, I slept well. I didn't expect the Nobel Prize this year", and that his plans for the day would not change. The lecture for the award took place on 8 December 2010 at Stockholm University. He said he hopes that graphene and other two-dimensional crystals will change everyday life as plastics did for humanity, although we need to wait for a few decades to see the results. Mark Miodownik said that his Ig Nobel Prize shows that people can still win a Nobel by "mucking about in a lab". The awards made him the first person to win, as an individual, both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize. On winning both the prizes, he has stated that
"Frankly, I value both my Ig Nobel prize and Nobel prize at the same level and for me Ig Nobel prize was the manifestation that I can take jokes, a little bit of self-deprecation always helps." 2010, Geim was inducted into the Guinness World Records as the "First individual to win both a Nobel and Ig Nobel prize".
== Personal life ==
=== View and opinions === Geim was one of 38 Nobel laureates who signed a declaration in 2010 issued by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East protesting an international initiative to boycott Israeli academics, institutions, and research centers. At the Nobel Minds symposium in December 2010, Geim said the Nobel Peace Prize committee's choice of Chinese dissident, the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was patronising, saying
"Look at the people who give this Nobel prize. They are retired Norwegian politicians who have spent all their careers in a safe environment, in an oil-rich modern country. They try to extend their views of the world, how the world should work and how democracy works in another country. It's very, very patronising— they have not lived in these countries. In the past 10 years, China has developed not only economically, but even the strongest human rights supporter would agree also human rights have improved. Why do we need to distort this?" Geim has written several opinion pieces for The Financial Times, examples of which can be found on his university webpage. In 2014, Geim's interview for Desert Island Discs, a popular BBC radio programme, revealed details of his personal life and taste in music. A quote from Geim was deliberately doctored by the campaign group Vote Leave in the run-up to the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. An open letter about science, signed by 13 Conservative MPs including Boris Johnson, attempted to paint European science funding as unnecessarily bureaucratic and deliberately misrepresented Geim's views on Europe:
As the Nobel Prize winner Andre Geim said: 'I can offer no nice words for the EU framework programmes [for research] which ... can be praised only by Europhobes for discrediting the whole idea of an effectively working Europe.' The ellipsis (...) present in the quotation from Geim's Nobel lecture removed the words "except for the European Research Council". In 2025, Geim automatically lost his Dutch citizenship due to his dual British nationality.
=== Identity === Geim has a complex ancestry which is described in detail in his Nobel Prize autobiography. There, Geim stated that most of his family are ethnic Germans, his father descended from Volga Germans and his mother mostly an ethnic German as well. Both his father and paternal grandfather had spent many years of their lives as prisoners in Siberia in Stalin's Gulags, and "some of the family had been prisoners in German concentration camps". He also states that he "suffered from anti-Semitism in Russia because my name sounds Jewish". Geim summarises his identity as follows. "To the best of my knowledge, the only Jew in the family was my great-grandmother, with the rest on both sides being German. Having lived and worked in several European countries, I consider myself European and do not believe that any further taxonomy is necessary, especially in such a fluid world as the world of science."
== References ==
== Further reading ==
"Documents at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology" (in Russian). Archived from the original on 20 July 2011. Geim's Nobel Prize banquet speech Publications at Astrophysics Data System, NASA Selected research papers by Andre Geim's group Selected research papers by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov related to research that won them the Nobel Prize
== External links == Andre Geim on Nobelprize.org