1966 in science

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The year 1966 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 3 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.
• March 1 – Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface.
• March 16 – NASA spacecraft Gemini 8 (David Scott, Neil Armstrong) conducts the first docking in space, with an Agena target vehicle.
• March 31 – The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the Moon.
• November – Notable display of the Leonids over the Americas.
• December 15 – Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, is identified by Audouin Dollfus (it had been first photographed on October 29).
• December 18 – Epimetheus, another of the moons of Saturn, is discovered, but mistaken for Janus which shares its orbit and they are not distinguished until 1978.

Earth Science

• Walter C. Pitman and James Heirtzler present the "magic" Eltanin marine magnetic anomaly profile that confirms the hypothesis of seafloor spreading at mid-ocean ridges.

Biology

• The first live specimen of a mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus), Australia's only truly hibernating marsupial, previously known only from the fossil record, is discovered.
• German entomologist Willi Hennig's Phylogenetic Systematics is published in English, advancing the study of cladistics.

Computer science

• Martin Richards designs the BCPL programming language.
• Roger MacGowan and Frederick Ordway first suggest the concept of machine superorganisms in Intelligence in the Universe.

Mathematics

• Chen Jingrun publishes Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of a prime and a semiprime.
• David Mumford introduces Mumford–Tate groups.

Physiology and medicine

• Gynecologist John McLean Morris and biologist Gertrude Van Wagenen at the Yale School of Medicine report the successful use of oral high-dose estrogen pills for post-coital contraception in women and rhesus macaque monkeys respectively.
• Victor A. McKusick publishes the first edition of his catalogue of all known genes and genetic disorders, Mendelian Inheritance in Man.
• Andreas Rett first describes Rett syndrome.

Psychology

• Human Sexual Response is published by Masters and Johnson.
• On Aggression and Behind the Mirror are published by Konrad Lorenz.

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Michael Atiyah, Paul Joseph Cohen, Alexander Grothendieck and Stephen Smale
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Alfred Kastler
  • Chemistry – Robert S. Mulliken
  • Medicine – Peyton Rous, Charles Brenton Huggins
• Turing Award – Alan Perlis

Births

• June 13 – Grigori Perelman, Russian mathematician.
• July 8 – Ralf Altmeyer, German virologist.
• August 7 – Jimmy Wales, American internet entrepreneur.

Deaths

• January 15 – Sergei Korolev (born 1907), Soviet space scientist.
• March 1 – Fritz Houtermans (born 1903), Prussian-born Dutch physicist.
• March 12 – Sydney Camm (born 1893), English aircraft designer.
• June 20 – Monsignor Georges Lemaître (born 1894), Belgian physicist.
• July 7 – George de Hevesy (born 1885), Hungarian winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.