Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Nobel Foundation was founded on the 29th of June 1900 as a private organisation in Stockholm, Sweden. It was established to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes following the death of Alfred Nobel in 1896.
Alfred Nobel was born on the 21st of October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden. He was a chemist, engineer, and armaments manufacturer best known as the inventor of dynamite. He held 355 patents during his lifetime and amassed a sizeable fortune primarily through that invention.
Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, amounting to 31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. By the end of 2024, the Nobel Foundation's investment capital had grown to 6.6 billion Swedish kronor, or roughly 700 million US dollars.
Alfred Nobel's will explicitly directed that the Peace Prize be awarded by a committee of five persons elected by the Norwegian Storting. When the union between Sweden and Norway dissolved in 1905, this arrangement became a formal division, with Norwegian bodies overseeing the Peace Prize and Swedish institutions handling all other prizes.
No. The Nobel Foundation does not select prize recipients. The prize-awarding institutions do: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, the Swedish Academy, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The Foundation manages the finances and administration of the prizes.
Nobel Symposia are a programme launched by the Nobel Foundation in 1965, devoted to scientific breakthroughs and topics of cultural or social significance. Topics have included prostaglandins, string theory, cosmology, diabetes mellitus, and the Cold War in the 1980s.