1976 in science

The year 1976 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• March – Faber–Jackson relation presented by astronomers Sandra M. Faber and Robert Earl Jackson. ^[1]
• June 18 – Gravity Probe A, a satellite-based experiment to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, is launched.
• July 20 – Viking program: The Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
• July 31 – NASA releases the famous 'Face on Mars' photograph, taken by Viking 1
• August 7 – Viking program: Viking 2 enters into orbit around Mars.
• August 22 – Luna program: Luna 24 successfully makes an unmanned landing on the Moon, the last for 37 years.
• September 3 – Viking program: The Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars and takes the first close-up color photographs of the planet's surface.
• September 17 – Space Shuttle Enterprise rolled out.
• Universe , a public domain film produced by Lester Novros for NASA, is released.

Aviation

• January 21 – Concorde begins commercial flights.
• December 8 – First flight of production General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Chemistry

• May – Marion M. Bradford publishes the Bradford protein assay method. ^[2]
• Oberlin, Endo and Koyama publish evidence of the creation of carbon nanotubes using a vapor-growth technique. ^{[3] [4]}

Computer science

• January – The Cray-1, the first commercially developed supercomputer, is released by Seymour Cray's Cray Research. Model 001 is installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.
• March – Peter Chen's key paper on the entity–relationship model is published, having first been presented at a conference in September 1975. ^[5]
• April 1 – Apple Computer Company is formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in California and on April 11 they launch their first computer, the Apple I, for the U.S. hobbyist market.
• November 26 – Little-known company Microsoft is officially registered with the Office of the Secretary of State of New Mexico.
• December – Release of Electric Pencil (originated by Michael Shrayer), the first word processor for home computers.

Cryptography

• November – An asymmetric-key cryptosystem is published by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman who disclose the Diffie–Hellman key exchange method of public-key agreement for public-key cryptography. ^[6]

History of science and technology

• October 3 – Opening of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology in Washington, D.C. ^[7]
• Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine is published.

Mathematics

• July 11 – Keuffel and Esser manufacture the last slide rule in the United States. ^[8]
• Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations: the Logic of Mathematical Discovery is published posthumously. ^[9]
• The four color theorem is proved by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. ^[9]
• Andrei Suslin and Daniel Quillen independently prove the Quillen–Suslin theorem ("Serre's conjecture") about the triviality of algebraic vector bundles on affine space.
• George Andrews locates a long lost manuscript containing over six hundred mathematical formulas by Srinivasa Ramanujan from 1919-1920 in a collection of materials bequeathed by G. N. Watson in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Paleontology

• Fossil footprints of bipedal hominini from 3.6M years BP are found at Laetoli in Tanzania by Andrew Hill when visiting Mary Leakey. ^[10]

Physiology, medicine and psychology

• July 27 – Delegates attending an American Legion convention at The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, US, begin falling ill with a form of pneumonia: this will eventually be recognised as the first outbreak of Legionnaires' disease and will end in the deaths of 29 attendees.
• August 26 – The Ebola virus first emerges in outbreaks of viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, followed by outbreaks in Sudan. ^[11]
• October 1–December 16 – Program of mass vaccination in the United States against the 1976 swine flu outbreak, suspended due to public fears over side-effects.
• October 28 – British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is published, introducing the term memetics.
• Dementia with Lewy bodies is first described by Japanese psychiatrist and neuropathologist Kenji Kosaka. ^[12]
• The term Münchausen syndrome by proxy is first coined by John Money and June Faith Werlwas. ^{[13] [14]}
• Norman F. Dixon publishes On the Psychology of Military Incompetence .

Technology

• The first laser printer is introduced by IBM (the IBM 3800).

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Burton Richter, Samuel C. C. Ting
  • Chemistry – William N. Lipscomb
  • Medicine – Baruch S. Blumberg, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
• Turing Award – Michael O. Rabin, Dana Scott

Births

• July 27 – Demis Hassabis, British artificial intelligence researcher.
• November 19 – Jack Dorsey, American web developer.

Deaths

• January 19 – Hidetsugu Yagi (b. 1886), Japanese electrical engineer.
• February 1
  • Werner Heisenberg (b. 1901), German theoretical physicist.
  • George Whipple (b. 1878), American pathologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934.
• April 5 – Wilder Penfield (b. 1891), American-Canadian neurosurgeon.
• April 21 – Carl Benjamin Boyer (b. 1906), American historian of mathematics.
• May 31 – Jacques Monod (b. 1910), French biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.
• August 18 – Shintaro Uda (b. 1886), Japanese electrical engineer.
• October 5 – Lars Onsager (b. 1903), Norwegian American chemist.
• September 16 – Bertha Lutz (b. 1894), Brazilian herpetologist and women's rights campaigner.
• September 26 – Pál Turán (b. 1910), Hungarian mathematician.
• November 5 – Willi Hennig (b. 1913), German entomologist and pioneer of cladistics.

References

1. Faber, S. M.; Jackson, R. E. (1976). "Velocity dispersions and mass-to-light ratios for elliptical galaxies". Astrophysical Journal. 204: 668–683. Bibcode:1976ApJ...204..668F. doi:10.1086/154215.
2. Bradford, Marion (1976). "A Rapid and Sensitive Method for the Quantification of Microgram Quantities of Protein Utilizing the Principle of Protein-Dye Binding" (PDF). Analytical Biochemistry . 72 (1–2): 248–254. doi:10.1006/abio.1976.9999. PMID   942051 – via Google Scholar.
3. Oberlin, A.; Endo, M.; Koyama, T. (March 1976). "Filamentous growth of carbon through benzene decomposition" (PDF). Journal of Crystal Growth. 32 (3): 335–349. Bibcode:1976JCrGr..32..335O. doi:10.1016/0022-0248(76)90115-9 . Retrieved 2012-02-03.
4. Endo, Morinobu; Dresselhaus, M. S. (2002). "Carbon Fibers and Carbon Nanotubes" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-02-03.
5. Chen, Peter Pin-Shan (March 1976). "The Entity–Relationship Model – Toward A Unified View of Data". ACM Transactions on Database Systems . 1 (1): 9–36. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.523.6679 . doi:10.1145/320434.320440. S2CID   52801746.
6. Diffie, Whitfield; Hellman, Martin E. (1976). "New directions in cryptography" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 22 (6): 644–654. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.37.9720 . doi:10.1109/TIT.1976.1055638 . Retrieved 2022-04-01.
7. "History of the Dibner Library". Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Libraries . Retrieved 2014-01-08.
8. "11th July 1976 – Last slide rule manufactured today". Computing History. The Centre for Computing History . Retrieved 2012-01-01.
9. Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know . London: Quercus. ISBN   978-1-84724-008-8.
10. "A Yale Tale: Fossil Footprints". Fossil Footprints. Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History. 2005. Archived from the original on 2020-11-07. Retrieved 2019-08-31.
11. Bennett, D.; Brown, D. (May 1995). "Ebola virus". British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Ed.). 310 (6991): 1344–1345. doi:10.1136/bmj.310.6991.1344. ISSN   0959-8138. PMC   2549737 . PMID   7787519.
12. Kosaka, K.; Oyanagi, S.; Matsushita, M.; Hori, A. (1976). "Presenile dementia with Alzheimer-, Pick- and Lewy-body changes". Acta Neuropathologica . 36 (3): 221–233. doi:10.1007/bf00685366. PMID   188300. S2CID   162001.
13. Money, John; Werlwas, June (1976). "Folie à deux in the parents of psychosocial dwarfs: two cases". Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. 4 (4): 351–362. PMID   1028417.
14. Money, John (1986). "Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy: Update". Journal of Pediatric Psychology. 11 (4): 583–584. doi:10.1093/jpepsy/11.4.583. PMID   3559846.