Nobel Foundation

Nobel Foundation

The Nobel Foundation logo
Formation	29 June 1900
Headquarters	, Sweden

The Nobel Foundation (Swedish: Nobelstiftelsen) is a private institution founded on 29 June 1900 to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes. The Foundation is based on the last will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.

It also holds Nobel Symposia on important breakthroughs in science and topics of cultural or social significance.

 Alfred Bernhard Nobel , born on 21 October 1833 in Sweden, was a chemist, engineer, innovator, armaments manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite. He owned Bofors, a major armaments manufacturer, which he had redirected from its original business as an iron and steel mill. Nobel held 355 different patents, dynamite being the most famous. Nobel amassed a sizeable personal fortune during his lifetime, thanks mostly to this invention. In 1896 Nobel died of a stroke in his villa in San Remo, Italy where he had lived out the last years of his life.

Nobel's will expressed a request, to the surprise of many, that his money be used for prizes in physics, chemistry, peace, physiology or medicine and literature. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, and signed at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on 27 November 1895. Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. (As of 2008 that equates to 186 million US dollars.)