1983 in science

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The year 1983 in science and technology involved many significant events, as listed below.

Biology

• April – Kary Mullis discovers polymerase chain reaction.
• May – First report of the virus that causes AIDS.
• June – First report of using a monoclonal antibody as a medical test.

Computer science

• January 1 – The ARPANET officially changes to use the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet.
• September 27 – Richard Stallman announces the GNU Project.
• November 10 – Fred Cohen demonstrates a self-replicating source code which his academic adviser at the University of Southern California, Leonard Adleman, likens to a virus.
• December – Yugoslav popular science magazine Galaksija releases a special (January 1984) issue, Računari u vašoj kući, with complete instructions on how to build a full-featured home computer, Galaksija.
• The US Federal Government standardizes Ada (programming language), a strongly typed, comb-structured computer language, with exception handlers, for general-purpose programming.
• Word processor software Multi-Tool Word, soon to become Microsoft Word, is released. Free demonstration copies on disk are distributed with the November issue of PC World magazine.

History of science

• Keith Thomas publishes Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in England, 1500–1800.
• Gerard L'Estrange Turner publishes Nineteenth-Century Scientific Insturments.

Mathematics

• Daniel Gorenstein (with Richard Lyons) proves the trichotomy theorem for finite simple groups of characteristic 2 type and rank at least 4, and announces that proof of the classification of finite simple groups is complete (although that for quasithin groups has not been demonstrated at this time).

Organizations

• Spain re-joins CERN after having left in 1969 (originally joined for the first time in 1961).

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, William Alfred Fowler
  • Chemistry – Henry Taube
  • Medicine – Barbara McClintock
• Turing Award – Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie

Deaths

• February 27 – Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, Russian astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1908)
• March 18 – Ivan Vinogradov, Russian mathematician (b. 1891)
• October 26 – Alfred Tarski, Polish American logician and mathematician (b. 1901)