1985 in science

The year 1985 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

Computer science

• March 15 – The first commercial Internet domain name, in the top-level domain .com, is registered in the name symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• November 20 – Microsoft Windows operating system released.

Environment

• May 16 – Scientists of the British Antarctic Survey announce discovery of the ozone hole.^[1][2][3]

Exploration

• September 1 – The wreck of the RMS Titanic (1912) in the North Atlantic is located by a joint American-French expedition led by Dr. Robert Ballard (WHOI) and Jean-Louis Michel (Ifremer) using side-scan sonar from RV Knorr.^[4][5]

Mathematics

• September - Dennis Sullivan publishes proof of the No wandering domain theorem.^[6]
• December – Publication of the ATLAS of Finite Groups.

Medicine

• February 19 – Artificial heart patient William Schroeder becomes the first such patient to leave hospital.
• March 4 – The United States Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS infection, used since this date for blood supply.
• Publication of a classified bibliography of 3500 reports on controlled trials in perinatal medicine published since 1940.^[7]
• New York-based neurologist Oliver Sacks publishes The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.

Physics

• Portugal joins CERN.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Klaus von Klitzing – for his discovery of the quantization of electrical resistance
  • Chemistry – Herbert A. Hauptman, Jerome Karle
  • Medicine – Michael S. Brown, Joseph L. Goldstein
• Turing Award – Richard Karp – for his work on computational complexity theory

Births

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it.

Deaths

• March 10 – C. B. van Niel (b. 1897), Dutch American microbiologist.
• April 20 – Charles Richter (b. 1900), American geophysicist and inventor.
• July 20 – Bruno de Finetti (b. 1906), Italian statistician.
• September 6 – Rodney Porter (b. 1917), English biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• September 7 – George Pólya (b. 1887), Hungarian mathematician.
• September 10 – Ernst Öpik (b. 1893), Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist.
• October 22 – Thomas Townsend Brown (b. 1905), American physicist.
• November 24 – László Bíró (b. 1899), Hungarian inventor.

References