1985 in science

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

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 7 –
  Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake
  , Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.

• The
  Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in the United States.^[1]

• March – The GNU Manifesto, written by Richard Stallman, is first published.
• March 15 – The first commercial
  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.^[2][3][4]

Exploration

• September 1 –
  Ifremer) using side-scan sonar from RV Knorr.^[5][6]

• March – Louis de Branges de Bourcia publishes proof of de Branges's theorem.^[7]
• September –
  No wandering domain theorem.^[8]
• December – Publication of the ATLAS of Finite Groups.
• Jean-Pierre Serre provides partial proof that a Frey curve cannot be modular, showing that a proof of the semistable case of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture would imply Fermat's Last Theorem.
• Leonard Adleman, Roger Heath-Brown and Étienne Fouvry prove that the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem holds for infinitely many odd primes p.^[9]

Physics

• September – Physicist Carl Sagan's hard science fiction novel Contact is published in the United States, introducing the concept of a traversable wormhole devised by Kip Thorne.^[10]
• Portugal joins CERN.

Physiology and medicine

• February 19 – Artificial heart patient William J. Schroeder becomes the first such patient to leave hospital.
• March 4 – The United States
  blood donations
  .
• March–May – Joshua Silver develops an adjustable corrective lens.
• September 12 – German surgeon
  laparoscopic cholecystectomy
  .
• October 17 – The British
  contraception
  or – by extension – other medical treatment without requiring parental permission or knowledge.
• Publication of a classified bibliography of 3500 reports on
  perinatal medicine published since 1940.^[12]
• DNA is first used in a criminal case.^[13]
• New York-based
  neurologist Oliver Sacks publishes The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
  and Other Clinical Tales.

• January 1 – The first British mobile phone calls are made.^[14][15]
• February 20 –
  Maxxum 7000, the world's first autofocus single-lens reflex camera
  .
• Atomic force microscope invented by Gerd Binnig, Calvin Quate and Christopher Berger.^[16]
• Akira Yoshino develops a practical lithium-ion battery.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • electrical resistance
  • Chemistry – Herbert A. Hauptman, Jerome Karle
  • Michael S. Brown, Joseph L. Goldstein
• Richard Karp – for his work on computational complexity theory

• August 26 – Hugo Duminil-Copin, French mathematician^[17]

Deaths

• March 10 –
  Dutch American microbiologist
  .
• April 20 –
  geophysicist and inventor
  .
• July 20 – Bruno de Finetti (b. 1906), Italian statistician.
• August 5 – Arnold Wilkins (b. 1907), English pioneer of radar.
• August 31 –
  Frank Macfarlane Burnet (b. 1899), Australian virologist best known for his contributions to immunology, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
  .
• 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 –
  astrophysicist
  .
• October 22 – Thomas Townsend Brown (b. 1905), American inventor.
• November 24 – László Bíró (b. 1899), Hungarian inventor.
• December 21 – Elliott Organick (b. 1925), American computer scientist and educator
• c. December 26 –
  primatologist
  (murdered).

References