1979 in science

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 7 – Pluto enters a 20-year period inside the orbit of Neptune for the first time in 230 years.
• March 7 – The largest magnetar event is recorded.
• July 11 – America's first space station, Skylab, is deliberately allowed to burn up on atmospheric 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 American Pioneer 11 becomes the first spacecraft to visit Saturn when it passes the planet at a distance of 21,000 km.
• December 24 - The maiden launch of Ariane 1, the first rocket in the Ariane launcher family.
• Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific given for the first time.

Biology

• Arthur William Baden Powell publishes New Zealand Mollusca.
• The Australian night parrot is sighted for the first time since 1912.

Computer science

• May 8 - Radio Shack releases TRSDOS 2.3
• VisiCalc becomes the first spreadsheet program.
• The US Federal Government releases the initial, draft version of Ada (programming language), a strongly typed, comb-structured language with exception handlers, for embedded systems.

Conservation

• April 5 – First stage of Kakadu National Park declared in Australia.

Earth sciences

• The RISE project first discovers hydrothermal vents known as 'black smokers', on a mid-ocean ridge in the Pacific Ocean.

History of science

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

Mathematics

• 'Monstrous moonshine': John Conway and Simon P. Norton prove there is a connection between the Monster group M and the j-function in number theory.
• The first modern Sudoku, known as Number Place, appears in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, devised by Howard Garns.

Medicine

• August – The eating disorder Bulimia nervosa is first described and named by British psychiatrist Gerald Russell.
• December 9 – The World Health Organization certifies the global eradication of smallpox.
• The last naturally occurring cases of polio are reported in the United States.
• Tumor protein p53 is identified by Lionel Crawford, David Lane, Arnold J. Levine and Lloyd J. Old.

Paleontology

• Dinosaur eggs found in the Two Medicine Formation of Montana.

Technology

• March 1 – Philips publicly demonstrate a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
• June 12 – Human-powered aircraft Gossamer Albatross, built by an American team led by Paul MacCready and piloted by Bryan Allen, makes a successful crossing of the English Channel to win the second Kremer prize.
• First sale of Post-It Notes in Boise, Idaho.

Awards

• 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

Births

• June 29 – Artur Avila, Brazilian-born mathematician.

Deaths

• January – Oscar H. Banker, Armenian American inventor.
• March 11 – Noël Poynter, English medical historian.
• March 17 – Henry Aaron Hill, American fluorocarbon chemist, first African American president of the American Chemical Society.
• April 5 – Eugène Gabritschevsky, Russian biologist and artist.
• May 6 – Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth, German astronomer.
• June 1 – Werner Forssmann, German physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• October 10 – Guido Fanconi, Swiss pediatrician.
• October 12 – Katharine Burr Blodgett, American physicist and chemist.
• October 30 – Sir Barnes Wallis, English aeronautical engineer.
• December 4 – Walther Müller, German-born American physicist
• December 7 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, English-born American astronomer and astrophysicist.