1979 in science

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

• 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 due to its decaying orbit and the lack of time to build a new spaceship to boost it up.
• 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.

• Arthur William Baden Powell
  publishes New Zealand Mollusca.

• Radio Shack releases TRSDOS
  2.3
• VisiCalc becomes the first spreadsheet program.
• The
  exception handlers
  , for embedded systems.

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

• The RISE project first discovers hydrothermal vents known as 'black smokers', on a mid-ocean ridge in the Pacific Ocean.

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

• '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]

• 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
  David Lane, Arnold J. Levine and Lloyd J. Old
  .

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

• March 1 – Philips publicly demonstrate a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
• June 12 –
  Bryan Allen, makes a successful crossing of the English Channel to win the second Kremer prize
  .
• First sale of
  Post-It Notes
  in Boise, Idaho.

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

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

• January –
  Armenian American
  inventor.
• March 11 –
  medical historian
  .
• March 17 –
  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.
• June 1 – Werner Forssmann (b. 1904), German physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• September 26 – Sir
  aeronautical engineer
  .
• October 10 –
  pediatrician
  .
• October 12 – Katharine Burr Blodgett (b. 1898), American physicist and chemist.
• December 7 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (b. 1900), English-born American astronomer and astrophysicist.^[6]