1979 in science

The year 1979 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 7 – Pluto enters a 20-year period inside the orbit of Neptune for the first time in 230 years.
• March 7 – The largest magnetar (soft gamma repeater) event is recorded.
• July 11 – America's first space station, Skylab, is deliberately allowed to burn up on atmospheric entry over the Indian Ocean.
• September 1 – The American Pioneer 11 becomes the first spacecraft to visit Saturn when it passes the planet at a distance of 21,000 km.
• December 24 – The maiden launch of Ariane 1, the first rocket in the Ariane launcher family.
• Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific given for the first time.

Biology

• Arthur William Baden Powell publishes New Zealand Mollusca.

Computer science

• VisiCalc becomes the first spreadsheet program.
• The US Federal Government releases the initial, draft version of Ada (programming language), a strongly typed, comb-structured language with exception handlers, for embedded systems.

Conservation

• April 5 – First stage of Kakadu National Park declared in Australia.

History of science

• Robert Gwyn Macfarlane publishes Howard Florey: The Making of a Great Scientist.

Mathematics

• 'Monstrous moonshine': John Conway and Simon P. Norton prove there is a connection between the Monster group M and the j-function in number theory.^[1]
• The first modern Sudoku, known as Number Place, appears in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games (United States), devised by Howard Garns.^[2]

Medicine

• August – The eating disorder Bulimia nervosa is first described and named by British psychiatrist Gerald Russell.^[3][4]
• December 9 – The World Health Organization certifies the global eradication of smallpox.^[5]
• The last naturally occurring cases of polio are reported in the United States.
• Tumor protein p53 is identified by Lionel Crawford, David Lane, Arnold J. Levine and Lloyd J. Old.

Paleontology

• Dinosaur eggs found in the Two Medicine Formation of Montana.

Technology

• March 1 – Philips publicly demonstrate a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
• June 12 – Human-powered aircraft Gossamer Albatross, built by an American team led by Paul MacCready and piloted by Bryan Allen, makes a successful crossing of the English Channel to win the second Kremer prize.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Sheldon Lee Glashow, Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg
  • Chemistry – Herbert C. Brown, Georg Wittig
  • Medicine – Allan M. Cormack, Godfrey N. Hounsfield
• Turing Award – Kenneth E. Iverson

Births

• June 29 – Artur Avila, Brazilian-born mathematician.

Deaths

• January – Oscar H. Banker (b. 1895), Armenian American inventor.
• March 17 – Henry Aaron Hill (b. 1915), American fluorocarbon chemist, first African American president of the American Chemical Society.
• April 5 – Eugène Gabritschevsky (b. 1893), Russian biologist and artist.
• May 6 – Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth (b. 1892), German astronomer.
• September 26 – Sir Barnes Wallis (b. 1887), English aeronautical engineer.
• October 10 – Guido Fanconi (b. 1892), Swiss pediatrician.

References