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Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai is the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize. She was just seventeen when she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her work promoting education for children, especially young women, in poor countries.

Writing to his brother, he once said: “Who has time to read biographical accounts? And who can be so simple or so good-natured as to be interested in them?” Pressed further, he said: “No one reads essays except about actors and murderers.” Perhaps Nobel’s desire for anonymity should have been respected. He is to most people a rather shadowy person, known more for the prizes he endowed than for his own achievements. But he should be more widely recognized as an outstanding scientist and industrialist, and his life was extremely interesting and colorful. From this point of view, Nobel was a man of baffling contradictions.

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