1971 in science

• 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.

• July – Francis G. Howarth discovers communities of specialized thermophile cave animals living in lava tubes at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.{{cite journal|title=Cavernicoles in Lava Tubes on the Island of Hawaii|first=Francis G.|last=Howarth|journal=Science|volume=175|issue=4019|date=1972-01-21|pages=325–326|jstor=1733505|doi=10.1126/science.175.4019.325|pmid=17814543|bibcode=1972Sci...175..325H|s2cid=36219772 }}
• C. A. W. Jeekel publishes Nomenclator Generum et Familiarum Diplopodorum.
• John O'Keefe discovers place cells in the mammalian brain.{{cite journal|last1=O'Keefe|first1=John|last2=Dostrovsky|first2=Jonathan|year=1971|title=The hippocampus as a spatial map: preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat|journal=Brain Research|volume=34|issue=1|pages=171–175|doi=10.1016/0006-8993(71)90358-1|pmid=5124915}}{{cite book|last=Binder|first=Marc D|title=Encyclopedia of Neuroscience|url=https://archive.org/details/encyclopedianeur00bind|url-access=limited|year=2009|publisher=Springer|isbn= 978-3-540-23735-8|page=[https://archive.org/details/encyclopedianeur00bind/page/n3228 3166]}}

• 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.{{cite web|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philosophy.html|publisher=Project Gutenberg|title=The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg|first=Michael|last=Hart|date=August 1992|access-date=2011-10-05}}.
• 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.{{cite web|first=Ray |last=Tomlinson |title=The First Network Email |url=http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html |access-date=2011-10-05 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060506003539/http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html |archive-date=2006-05-06 }}
• 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.

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

• 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.

• Stephen Cook introduces the concept of NP-completeness in computational complexity theory at the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.{{cite book|last=Cook|first=Stephen|year=1971|chapter=The complexity of theorem proving procedures|chapter-url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=805047|title=Proceedings of the Third Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing|pages=151–158|doi=10.1145/800157.805047 |isbn=9781450374644 |s2cid=7573663 }}
• Daniel Quillen publishes a proof of the Adams conjecture.{{cite journal|last=Quillen|first=Daniel|title=The Adams Conjecture|doi=10.1016/0040-9383(71)90018-8|mr=0279804|year=1971|journal=Topology|issn=0040-9383|volume=10|pages=67–80|doi-access=free}}
• Steven Takiff introduces Takiff algebras.{{cite journal|author-link=Steven Takiff|last1=Takiff|first1=S. J.|title=Rings of invariant polynomials for a class of Lie algebras|jstor=1995803|doi=10.2307/1995803|mr=0281839|year=1971|journal=Transactions of the American Mathematical Society|issn=0002-9947|volume=160|pages=249–262|doi-access=free}}
• The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument is first presented explicitly, by Hilary Putnam in his book Philosophy of Logic.

• 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.{{cite journal|last=Beckmann|first=E. C.|title=CT scanning: the early days|doi=10.1259/bjr/29444122|journal=British Journal of Radiology|volume=79|issue=937|pages=5–8|year=2006|pmid=16421398}}
• 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.{{cite journal|last=Bywaters|first=E. G. L.|title=Still's disease in the adult|journal=Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases|volume=30|issue=2|pages=121–33|date=March 1971|pmid=5315135|pmc=1005739|doi=10.1136/ard.30.2.121|url=}}
• Smallpox is eradicated from the Americas.{{cite news|url=http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10798%3Aamericas-free-of-rubella&catid=740%3Anews-press-releases&Itemid=1926&lang=en|title=Americas region is declared the world's first to eliminate rubella|publisher=WHO|date=2015-04-30|access-date=2015-04-30|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150518102827/http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10798%3Aamericas-free-of-rubella&catid=740%3Anews-press-releases&Itemid=1926&lang=en|archive-date=2015-05-18}}

• August 3 – The Fighting Dinosaurs, a fossil specimen featuring a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops in combat, is first located in the Late Cretaceous Djadochta Formation of Mongolia by a Polish-Mongolian team.{{cite journal|last1=Kielan-Jaworowska|first1=Z.|last2=Barsbold|first2=R.|date=1972|title=Narrative of the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions, 1967-1971|journal=Palaeontologia Polonica|volume=27|pages=1−12|url=http://www.palaeontologia.pan.pl/Archive/1972-27_5-13_1-2.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240520234553/http://www.palaeontologia.pan.pl/Archive/1972-27_5-13_1-2.pdf|archive-date=2024-05-20|url-status=dead}}

• Roger Penrose proposes the Penrose process.{{cite journal|first1=R.|last1=Penrose|first2=R. M.|last2=Floyd|title=Extraction of Rotational Energy from a Black Hole|journal=Nature Physical Science|volume=229|issue=6|page=177|year=1971|doi=10.1038/physci229177a0|bibcode=1971NPhS..229..177P}}

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

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.
• April 12 – Igor Tamm (b. 1895), Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• June 6 – Edward Andrade (b. 1887), English physicist.
• June 15
• Hillel Oppenheimer (b. 1899), German-born Israeli botanist.
• Wendell Meredith Stanley (b. 1904), American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate.
• June 30 – Soviet cosmonauts
• Georgy Dobrovolsky (b. 1928)
• Vladislav Volkov (b. 1935)
• Viktor Patsayev (b. 1933)
• September 15 – Benno Mengele (b. 1898), Austrian electrical engineer

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Category:20th century in science

Category:1970s in science