Ivar Giaever might not have won the Nobel Prize in Physics if a job recruiter at General Electric had known the difference between the educational grading systems of the United States and Norway.

It was 1956, and he was applying for a position at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. The interviewer looked at his grades, from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, where Dr. Giaever (pronounced JAY-ver) had studied mechanical engineering, and was impressed: The young applicant had scored 4.0 marks in math and physics. The recruiter congratulated him.

But what the recruiter didn’t know was that in Norway, the best grade was a 1.0, not a 4.0, the top grade in American schools. In fact, a 4.0 in Norway was barely passing — something like a D on American report cards. In reality, his academic record in Norway had been anything but impressive.

He did not want to be dishonest, Dr. Giaever would say in recounting the episode with some amusement over the years, but he also did not correct the interviewer. He got the job.

He proceeded to spend the next 32 years at the laboratory, along the way developing an experiment using superconductors that provided proof of a central idea in quantum physics — that subatomic particles can behave like powerful waves — confirming a game-changing theory about superconductivity. For his work, Dr. Giaever shared the Nobel Prize in 1973.