1985 in science

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

Chemistry

• The fullerene Buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀) is first intentionally prepared by Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in the United States.^[1]

Computer science

• March 15 – The first commercial Internet domain name, in the top-level domain .com, is registered in the name 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 – The wreck of the RMS Titanic (1912) in the North Atlantic is located by a joint American-French expedition led by Dr. Robert Ballard (WHOI) and Jean-Louis Michel (Ifremer) using side-scan sonar from RV Knorr.^[5][6]

Mathematics

• March – Louis de Branges de Bourcia publishes proof of de Branges's theorem.^[7]
• September – Dennis Sullivan publishes proof of the 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]

Medicine

• February 19 – Artificial heart patient William J. Schroeder becomes the first such patient to leave hospital.
• March 4 – The United States Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS infection, used since this date for testing all U.S. blood donations.
• March–May – Joshua Silver develops an adjustable corrective lens.
• October 17 – The British House of Lords decides the legal case of Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority^[10] which sets the significant precedent of Gillick competence, i.e. that a child of 16 or under may be competent to consent to contraception or – by extension – other medical treatment without requiring parental permission or knowledge.
• Publication of a classified bibliography of 3500 reports on controlled trials in perinatal medicine published since 1940.^[11]
• New York-based neurologist Oliver Sacks publishes The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.

Physics

• Portugal joins CERN.

Technology

• January 1 – The first British mobile phone calls are made.^[12][13]
• Atomic force microscope invented by Gerd Binnig, Calvin Quate and Christopher Berger.^[14]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Klaus von Klitzing – for his discovery of the quantization of electrical resistance
  • Chemistry – Herbert A. Hauptman, Jerome Karle
  • Medicine – Michael S. Brown, Joseph L. Goldstein
• Turing Award – Richard Karp – for his work on computational complexity theory

Deaths

• March 10 – C. B. van Niel (b. 1897), Dutch American microbiologist.
• April 20 – Charles Richter (b. 1900), American geophysicist and inventor.
• July 20 – Bruno de Finetti (b. 1906), Italian statistician.
• 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 – Ernst Öpik (b. 1893), Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist.
• October 22 – Thomas Townsend Brown (b. 1905), American inventor.
• November 24 – László Bíró (b. 1899), Hungarian inventor.
• c. December 26 – Dian Fossey (b. 1932), American primatologist (murdered).

References

1. Kroto, H. W.; Heath, J. R.; O'Brien, S. C.; Curl, R. F.; Smalley, R. E. (1985). "C₆₀: Buckminsterfullerene". Nature 318 (6042): 162–163. Bibcode:1985Natur.318..162K. doi:10.1038/318162a0.
2. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
3. Farman, J. C.; Gardiner, B. G.; Shanklin, J. D. (1985). "Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica reveal seasonal ClO_x/NO_x interaction" (PDF). Nature 315 (6016): 207–10. Bibcode:1985Natur.315..207F. doi:10.1038/315207a0. Retrieved 4 May 2011.
4. Zehr, Stephen C. (1994). "Accounting for the Ozone Hole: Scientific Representations of an Anomaly and Prior Incorrect Claims in Public Settings". The Sociological Quarterly 35: 603–19. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1994.tb00419.x. JSTOR 4121521.
5. Alfred, Randy (2008-02-09). "Sept. 2, 1985: Hey, Everyone, We Found the Titanic". Wired. Retrieved 2011-11-03.
6. Ballard, Robert D. (December 1985). "How We Found the Titanic". National Geographic 168 (6): 696–718.
7. de Branges, Louis (1985). "A proof of the Bieberbach conjecture". Acta Mathematica 154 (1): 137–152. doi:10.1007/BF02392821. MR 772434.
8. Sullivan, Dennis (1985). "Quasiconformal homeomorphisms and dynamics I. Solution of the Fatou-Julia problem on wandering domains". Annals of Mathematics 122 (2): 401–418. doi:10.2307/1971308. JSTOR 1971308.
9. Adleman L. M.; Heath-Brown, D. R. (June 1985). "The first case of Fermat's last theorem". Inventiones Mathematicae (Berlin: Springer) 79 (2): 409–416. Bibcode:1985InMat..79..409A. doi:10.1007/BF01388981.
10. [1985] 3 All ER 402 (HL).
11. "About the Cochrane Library". The Cochrane Library. Archived from the original on 2011-01-05. Retrieved 2011-01-25.
12. "Mobiles rack up 20 years of use". BBC News. 2005-01-01. Retrieved 2008-01-29.
13. "UK's first mobile phone user remembers his call 30 years on". BBC News. 2005-01-01. Retrieved 2005-01-01.
14. Binnig, G.; Quate, C. F.; Berger, Ch. (1986-03-03). "Atomic Force Microscope". Physical Review Letters 56 (9): 930–933. Bibcode:1986PhRvL..56..930B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.930. PMID 10033323.