The year1979 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

• February 7 –Pluto enters a 20-year period inside the orbit ofNeptune for the first time in 230 years.
• March 7 – The largestmagnetar (soft gamma repeater) event is recorded.
• July 11 – America's first space station,Skylab, is deliberately allowed to burn up onatmospheric 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 AmericanPioneer 11 becomes the first spacecraft to visitSaturn when it passes the planet at a distance of 21,000 km.
• December 24 – The maiden launch ofAriane 1, the first rocket in theAriane launcher family.
• Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific given for the first time.

• Arthur William Baden Powell publishesNew Zealand Mollusca.

• May 8 -Radio Shack releasesTRSDOS 2.3
• VisiCalc becomes the firstspreadsheet program.
• TheUS Federal Government releases the initial, draft version ofAda (programming language), a strongly typed, comb-structured language withexception handlers, for embedded systems.

• April 5 – First stage ofKakadu National Park declared inAustralia.

• TheRISE project first discovershydrothermal vents known as 'black smokers', on amid-ocean ridge in thePacific Ocean.

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

• 'Monstrous moonshine':John Conway andSimon P. Norton prove there is a connection between theMonster groupM and thej-function in number theory.^[1]
• The first modernSudoku, known asNumber Place, appears inDell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games (United States), devised byHoward Garns.^[2]

• August – Theeating disorderBulimia nervosa is first described and named by British psychiatristGerald Russell.^[3][4]
• December 9 – TheWorld Health Organization certifies the global eradication ofsmallpox.^[5]
• The last naturally occurring cases ofpolio are reported in the United States.
• Tumorproteinp53 is identified byLionel Crawford,David Lane,Arnold J. Levine andLloyd J. Old.

• Dinosaur eggs found in theTwo Medicine Formation ofMontana.

• March 1 –Philips publicly demonstrate a prototype of anoptical digital audio disc at a press conference inEindhoven, Netherlands.
• June 12 –Human-powered aircraftGossamer Albatross, built by anAmerican team led byPaul MacCready and piloted byBryan Allen, makes a successful crossing of theEnglish Channel to win the secondKremer prize.
• First sale ofPost-It Notes in Boise, Idaho.

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

• June 29 –Artur Avila,Brazilian-bornmathematician.

• January –Oscar H. Banker (b.1895),Armenian American inventor.
• March 11 –Noël Poynter (b.1908), Englishmedical historian.
• March 17 –Henry Aaron Hill (b.1915),Americanfluorocarbon chemist, firstAfrican American president of theAmerican Chemical Society.
• April 5 –Eugène Gabritschevsky (b.1893),Russianbiologist andartist.
• May 6 –Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth (b.1892),Germanastronomer.
• June 1 –Werner Forssmann (b.1904), Germanphysician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• September 26 – SirBarnes Wallis (b.1887),Englishaeronautical engineer.
• October 10 –Guido Fanconi (b.1892),Swisspediatrician.
• 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]

• 1979 in science
• 20th century in science
• 1970s in science

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