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 31 - The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the Moon.
• Notable display of the Leonids over the Americas.^[1]

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.^[2]
• 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.^[3]

Physiology and medicine

• Victor A. McKusick publishes the first edition of his catalogue of all known genes and genetic disorders, Mendelian Inheritance in Man.

Psychology

• 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 - A.J. 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 Lema tre (born 1894), Belgian physicist.
• July 7 - George de Hevesy (born 1885), Hungarian winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

References

fr:1966 en science he:1966 mk:1966 pl:1966 w nauce pt:1966 na ci ncia ru:1966 sv:Vetenskaps ret 1966