1964 in science

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The year 1964 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Contents

1 Astronomy and space exploration
2 Computer science
3 Mathematics
4 Medicine
5 Paleontology
6 Physics
7 Psychology
8 Publications
9 Awards
10 Births
11 Deaths
12 References

Astronomy and space exploration

March 20 - The precursor of the European Space Agency, ESRO (European Space Research Organization) is established (under an agreement of June 14, 1962).
July 31 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the Moon; images are 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from Earth-bound telescopes.
October 12 - The Soviet Union launches the Voskhod 1 into Earth orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight without space suits.

Computer science

April 7 - IBM announces the System/360, in six models with 32-bit architecture.
May 1 - John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz run the first program created in BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy to learn high level programming language that will eventually be included on many computers and even some games consoles.
PL/I (Programming Language I), a block-structured computer language, is created by George Radin, while at IBM.

Mathematics

Paul Cohen proves the independence of the continuum hypothesis.^[1]
Jacques Tits publishes significant work on group theory.^[2]

Medicine

January 11 - U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry reports that smoking may be hazardous for one's health in the first such statement from U.S. federal government.
January 16 - First angioplasty carried out, on the superficial femoral artery by U.S. interventional radiologist Charles Dotter.^[3]^[4]
Jerome Horowitz synthesizes AZT, an antiviral drug that will come to be used in treating HIV.
The Epstein-Barr virus is first described, by Anthony Epstein, Bert Achong and Yvonne Barr.^[5]
Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is first described, by Drs Michael Lesch and William Nyhan.

Paleontology

August - John Ostrom identifies remains of the dinosaur Deinonychus in Montana, significant in being a small, agile species closely related to the birds.^[6]

Physics

Three papers are published by Robert Brout and François Englert,^[7]^[8] Peter Higgs,^[9] and Gerald Guralnik, Dick Hagen, and Tom Kibble,^[10]^[11] predicting the Higgs boson and Higgs mechanism (or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism) which provides the means by which gauge bosons can acquire non-zero masses in the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking.^[12] As part of Physical Review Letters' 50th anniversary celebration, the journal will recognize each of these contributions as milestone papers in its history.^[13]
Existence of the charm quark is speculated by James Bjorken and Sheldon Glashow.^[14]

Psychology

Publication of Eric Berne's book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.

Publications

Science Citation Index begins publication.

Awards

Nobel Prizes

Births

August 25 - Maxim Kontsevich, Russian mathematician.

Deaths

April 24 - Gerhard Domagk (b. 1895), German winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
December 1 - J. B. S. Haldane (b. 1892), British geneticist.
December 17 - Victor Franz Hess (b. 1883), American physicist.
December 30 - Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt (b. 1885), German neuropathologist.

References

^ Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London: Quercus. p. 73. ISBN 978-1-84724-008-8.
^ Tits, Jacques (1964). "Algebraic and abstract simple groups". Annals of Mathematics 2nd series 80: 313–329. ISSN 0003-486X. JSTOR 1970394. MR 0164968.
^ Dotter, Charles T.; Judkins, Melvin P. (November 1964). "Transluminal Treatment of Arteriosclerotic Obstruction: Description of a New Technic and a Preliminary Report of Its Application". Circulation 30 (5): 654–670. doi:10.1161/01.CIR.30.5.654. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/30/5/654.full.pdf+html.
^ Rosch, Josef et al. (2003). "The Birth, Early Years, and Future of Interventional Radiology". Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology 14 (7): 841–853. PMID 12847192.
^ Epstein, M. A.; Achong, B. G.; Barr, Y. M. (1964-03-28). "Virus particles in cultured lymphoblasts from Burkitt's lymphoma". The Lancet: 702–703.
^ Ostrom, J. H. (1969). "Osteology of Deinonychus antirrhopus, an unusual theropod from the Lower Cretaceous of Montana". Peabody Museum of Natural History Bulletin 30: 1–165. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/10658785#7.
^ Englert, F.; Brout, R. (1964). "Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons". Physical Review Letters 13: 321–323. Bibcode 1964PhRvL..13..321E. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.321.
^ Brout, R.; Englert, F. (1998). "Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Gauge Theories: A Historical Survey". arXiv:hep-th/9802142 [hep-th].
^ Higgs, P. W. (1964). "Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons". Physical Review Letters 13: 508–509. Bibcode 1964PhRvL..13..508H. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.508.
^ Guralnik, G. S.; Hagen, C. R.; Kibble, T. W. B. (1964). "Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles". Physical Review Letters 13: 585–587. Bibcode 1964PhRvL..13..585G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.585.
^ Guralnik, G. S. (2009). "The History of the Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble development of the Theory of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Gauge Particles". International Journal of Modern Physics A 24: 2601–2627. arXiv:0907.3466. Bibcode 2009IJMPA..24.2601G. doi:10.1142/S0217751X09045431.
^ Kibble, T. W. B. (2009). "Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism". Scholarpedia 4 (1): 6441. doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.6441. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble_mechanism.
^ Physical Review Letters 50th Anniversary Milestone Papers.
^ Bjørken, B. J.; Glashow, S. L. (1964). "Elementary particles and SU(4)". Physics Letters 11 (3): 255–257. Bibcode 1964PhL....11..255B. doi:10.1016/0031-9163(64)90433-0. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=272686&_user=126524&_pii=0031916364904330&_check=y&_origin=browse&_coverDate=01-Aug-1964&view=c&wchp=dGLbVlV-zSkWz&md5=4b97a4a882d59fd5ba83c9613825431a/1-s2.0-0031916364904330-main.pdf. Retrieved 2011-11-11.