1975 in science

The year 1975 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

List of years in science (table)
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Astronomy and space exploration

• April 19 – Aryabhata, India's first satellite, is launched using Soviet boosters.
• July 17 – Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft dock with each other in orbit marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.
• August 20 – Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.

Biology

• August 7 – César Milstein and Georges Köhler report their discovery of how to use hybridoma cells to isolate monoclonal antibodies, effectively beginning the history of monoclonal antibody use in science.[1][2]
• Living specimens of the Chacoan Peccary (Catagonus wagneri), previously known only from fossils, are identified in Paraguay.[3]

Climatology

• August 8 – The term global warming is probably first used in its modern sense by Wallace Smith Broecker.[4][5][6]

Computer science

• January – Altair 8800 is released, sparking the era of the microcomputer.
• March 5 – Hackers in Silicon Valley hold the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
• April 4 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen form a company at this time called Micro Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to develop and sell BASIC interpreter software for the Altair 8800.
• The MOS Technology 6502 is introduced. An 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small team led by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology. It was, by a considerable margin, the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market.

Mathematics

• Benoit Mandelbrot coins the term fractal.
• The Harada–Norton group is discovered.[7][8]
• John N. Mather and Richard McGehee prove that for the Newtonian collinear four-body problem there exist solutions which become unbounded in a finite time interval.[9][10][11]
• The Monty Hall problem in probability is first posed, by Steve Selvin.[12][13]

Medicine

• Lyme disease first recognised at Lyme, Connecticut.
• Mini–mental state examination (MMSE) or Folstein test introduced to screen for dementia or other cognitive dysfunction.[14]

Technology

• Steven Sasson of Eastman Kodak in the United States produces the first self-contained (portable) digital camera.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Aage Bohr, Ben Roy Mottelson, James Rainwater
  • Chemistry – John Warcup Cornforth, Vladimir Prelog
  • Medicine – David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco, Howard Martin Temin
• Turing Award – Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon

Births

• July 11 – Naomi McClure-Griffiths, American-born astrophysicist.
• July 17 – Terence Tao, Australian-born mathematician.
• November 14 – Martin Hairer, Austrian-born mathematician.
• Catherine A. Lozupone, American microbiologist.

Deaths

• February 14 – Sir Julian Huxley (b. 1887), English biologist and author.
• April 19 – Percy Lavon Julian (b. 1899), African American research chemist.
• May 14 – Ernst Alexanderson (b. 1878), Swedish American television pioneer.
• May 18 – Christopher Strachey (b. 1916), English computer scientist.
• June 8 – Douglas Guthrie (b. 1885), Scottish otolaryngologist and medical historian.
• June 27 – Sir Geoffrey Taylor (b. 1886), English physicist.
• September 5 – Alice Catherine Evans (b. 1881), American microbiologist.
• October 10 – August Dvorak (b. 1894), American educational psychologist.
• October 23 – Gordon Hamilton Fairley (b. 1930), British oncologist.
• November – Priscilla Fairfield Bok (b. 1896), American astronomer.
• December 13 – Mary Locke Petermann (b. 1908), American cellular biochemist.
• December 28 – Frances McConnell-Mills (b. 1900), American toxicologist.

References

1. Kohler, G.; Milstein, C. (1975). "Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined specificity". Nature. 256 (5517): 495–497. Bibcode:1975Natur.256..495K. doi:10.1038/256495a0. PMID 1172191.
2. Waldman, Thomas A. (2003). "Immunotherapy: past, present and future". Nature Medicine. 9 (3): 269–277. doi:10.1038/nm0303-269. PMID 12612576.
3. Naish, Darren (2008-11-24). "New, obscure, and nearly extinct rodents of South America, and... when fossils come alive". Tetrapod Zoology. Archived from the original on 16 December 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-13.
4. Broecker, Wallace S. (1975-08-08). "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?". Science. 189 (4201): 460–463. Bibcode:1975Sci...189..460B. doi:10.1126/science.189.4201.460. PMID 17781884.
5. Stefan (2010-07-28). "Happy 35th birthday, global warming!". RealClimate. Retrieved 2012-01-28. [Broecker's article is] the first of over 10,000 papers for this search term according to the ISI database of journal articles
6. Johnson, Brad (2010-08-03). "Wally's World". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 2012-01-28.
7. Harada, Koichiro (1976). "On the simple group F of order ${\displaystyle 2^{14}\cdot 3^{6}\cdot 5^{6}\cdot 7\cdot 11\cdot 19}$". Proceedings of the Conference on Finite Groups (Univ. Utah, Park City, Utah, 1975). Boston, MA: Academic Press. pp. 119–276. MR 0401904.
8. Norton, Simon P. (1975). F and other simple groups. University of Cambridge: PhD Thesis.
9. Mather, J. N.; McGehee, R. (1975). Solutions of the collinear four body problem which become unbounded in finite time. Lecture Notes in Physics. 38. pp. 573–597. doi:10.1007/3-540-07171-7_18. ISBN 978-3-540-07171-6.
10. Saari, Donald G.; Xia, Zhihong (Jeff) (1995). "Off to infinity in finite time" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 42 (5).
11. Chenciner, Alain (2007). "The three body problem". Scholarpedia. 2 (10): 2111. Bibcode:2007SchpJ...2.2111C. doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.2111.
12. Selvin, Steve (February 1975). "A problem in probability (letter to the editor)". The American Statistician. 29 (1): 67–71. doi:10.1080/00031305.1975.10479121.
13. Selvin, Steve (August 1975). "On the Monty Hall problem (letter to the editor)". American Statistician. 29 (3): 134.
14. Folstein, Marshal F; Folstein, Susan E; McHugh, Paul R (1975). ""Mini-mental state": A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician". Journal of Psychiatric Research. 12 (3): 189–98. doi:10.1016/0022-3956(75)90026-6. PMID 1202204.