1971 in science

The year 1971 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

 * January 31 – Apollo program: Astronauts aboard Apollo 14 lift off for a mission to the Moon.
 * February 5 – Apollo 14 lands on the Moon.
 * February 9 – Apollo program: Apollo 14 returns to Earth after the third crewed Moon landing.
 * May 19 – Mars probe program: Mars 2 is launched by the Soviet Union.
 * May 30 – Mariner program: Mariner 9 is launched toward Mars.
 * June 30 – The crew of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft are killed when their air supply leaks out through a faulty valve during re-entry preparations, the only human deaths to occur outside Earth's atmosphere.
 * July 26 – Apollo program: Launch of Apollo 15. On July 31 the Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover a day after landing on the Moon's surface.
 * November 13 – Mariner program: Mariner 9 enters Mars orbit.

Biology

 * July – Francis G. Howarth discovers communities of specialized thermophile cave animals living in lava tubes at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
 * C. A. W. Jeekel publishes Nomenclator Generum et Familiarum Diplopodorum.
 * John O'Keefe discovers place cells in the mammalian brain.

Computer science

 * July 4 – Michael S. Hart posts the first e-book, a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, on the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's mainframe computer, the origin of Project Gutenberg.
 * November 3 – The Unix Programmer's Manual is published.
 * November 15 – Intel release the world's first microprocessor, the 4004.
 * November/December – Computer Space is released, the first arcade video game.
 * Ray Tomlinson sends the first ARPAnet e-mail between host computers, at BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the first use of the @ sign in an address.
 * Kenbak-1 goes on sale, considered to be the world's first personal computer by the Computer History Museum and the American Computer Museum.
 * The earliest floppy disks, 8 inches in diameter, become commercially available as components of products shipped by IBM, their inventor.

Conservation

 * February 2 – The international Ramsar Convention for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands is signed in Ramsar, Mazandaran, Iran.

Earth sciences

 * February 9 – The San Fernando (Sylmar) earthquake occurs in southern California with a magnitude of 6.6 and a perceived intensity of XI (extreme) on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale.

Mathematics

 * Stephen Cook introduces the concept of NP-completeness in computational complexity theory at the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.
 * Daniel Quillen publishes a proof of the Adams conjecture.
 * Steven Takiff introduces Takiff algebras.
 * The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument is first presented explicitly, by Hilary Putnam in his book Philosophy of Logic.

Medicine

 * October 1 – Godfrey Hounsfield's invention, X-ray computed tomography, is first used on a patient with a cerebral cyst at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London.
 * Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes Our Bodies, Ourselves in the U.S.
 * E. G. L. Bywaters characterises adult-onset Still's disease, a rare form of inflammatory arthritis.
 * Smallpox is eradicated from the Americas.

Physics

 * Roger Penrose proposes the Penrose process.

Psychology

 * August 14–20 – Stanford prison experiment.
 * Konrad Lorenz publishes Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume II.

Technology

 * Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs in the United States set out the parameters for a practical cellular telephone network.
 * J. J. Stiffler publishes his book Theory of Synchronous Communications and edits a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Communication Technology on error correction codes.

Institutions

 * Paris Descartes University begins to function in continuation of the medical department of the University of Paris.

Awards

 * Nobel Prizes
 * Physics – Dennis Gabor
 * Chemistry – Gerhard Herzberg
 * Medicine – Earl W Sutherland, Jr
 * Turing Award – John McCarthy

Births

 * May 29 – Howard Gobioff (d. 2008), American computer scientist.
 * June 28 – Elon Musk, South African-born Canadian-American entrepreneur, engineer, inventor and investor.
 * July 4 – Sivakumar Veerasamy, Indian plant geneticist.
 * July 21 – Sara Seager, Canadian-American astrophysicist.
 * August 2 – Ruth Lawrence, English-born mathematician.

Deaths

 * January 23 – Fritz Feigl (b. 1891), Austrian-born Brazilian chemist
 * January 25 – Donald Winnicott (b. 1896), English child psychiatrist.
 * February 16 – Heinrich Willi (b. 1900), Swiss pediatrician.
 * February 25 – Theodor Svedberg (b. 1884), Swedish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
 * March 11 – Philo T. Farnsworth (b. 1906), American television pioneer.
 * April 1 – Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (b. 1903), Irish-born crystallographer.
 * April 6 – Margaret Newton (b. 1887), Canadian plant pathologist.
 * June 6 – Edward Andrade (b. 1887), English physicist.
 * June 30 – Soviet cosmonauts
 * Georgy Dobrovolsky (b. 1928)
 * Vladislav Volkov (b. 1935)
 * Viktor Patsayev (b. 1933)