1982 in science

The year 1982 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• March 10 – Syzygy: all 9 planets align on the same side of the Sun.

Biology

• September – First report of anti-human monoclonal antibody production.^[1]

Computer science

• First computer virus, the Elk Cloner, written by 15-year old Rich Skrenta, escapes into the wild.^[2]

History of science

• Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist is published by Russell McCormmach. McCormmach uses the novel to present a historiographic point meant to reinforce Thomas Kuhn's conception of a non-linear scientific development.

Mathematics

• Michael Freedman proves the Poincaré conjecture in dimensions equal to 4.^[3]
• Brazilian mathematician Celso Costa gives a mathematical description of Costa's minimal surface, the first embedded minimal surface discovered in more than a century.^[4]

Medicine

• December 2 – At the University of Utah, 61-year-old retired dentist Barney Clark becomes the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart; he lives for 112 days with the device.

Psychology

• The Foundations of Ethology is published by Konrad Lorenz.

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Alain Connes, William Thurston and Shing-Tung Yau
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Kenneth G. Wilson
  • Chemistry – Aaron Klug
  • Medicine – Sune K. Bergström, Bengt I. Samuelsson, John R. Vane
• Turing Award – Stephen Cook

Births

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Deaths

• April 9 – Robert Havemann (b. 1910), German chemist.
• May 3 – Henri Tajfel (b. 1919), Polish-born British social psychologist.
• May 22 – Jay Laurence Lush (b. 1896), American livestock geneticist.
• June 12 – Karl von Frisch (b. 1886), Austrian-born ethologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• July 29 – Vladimir K. Zworykin (b. 1889), Russian American pioneer of television technology.
• December 27 – Jack Swigert (b. 1931), American astronaut.

References