1990

Nobel Prize in Physics

Jerome I. Friedman · Henry W. Kendall · Richard E. Taylor

At Stanford's linear accelerator in the late 1960s, Friedman, Kendall, and Taylor fired electrons at protons and found that the electrons sometimes bounced back at large angles — precisely what would happen if the proton contained small, hard, point-like objects inside it. The quarks, long hypothesised by theorists, had been seen behaving as if they were real.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Elias James Corey

Corey introduced retrosynthetic analysis: the idea that a chemist planning to make a complex molecule should work backwards, asking at each step which simpler precursor could give rise to the current target. The approach turned organic synthesis from an art pursued by intuition into something closer to a systematic procedure, and Corey demonstrated it by completing more than a hundred total syntheses.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Joseph E. Murray · E. Donnall Thomas

Murray performed the first successful kidney transplant between identical twins in 1954, demonstrating that a foreign organ could function permanently in a new body when the immune barrier was not an obstacle. Thomas then crossed that barrier, developing bone marrow transplantation as a treatment for leukaemia and working out the principles of immunosuppression that made transplantation between unrelated individuals possible.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Octavio Paz

Paz moved between poetry, criticism, and the essay with the ease of someone for whom genres were not separate territories but different viewing angles on the same country. Piedra de Sol and El laberinto de la soledad — a meditation on Mexican identity and the masks a culture wears — secured his reputation; he became the first Mexican to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Nobel Peace Prize

Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika policies had been intended to reform Soviet socialism, not dissolve it; by 1990 the dissolution was well underway regardless, as Eastern European nations he had declined to suppress with force moved through democratic transitions at a pace that surprised everyone, including him. The Nobel committee awarded the prize for the role he played in ending the Cold War.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Harry M. Markowitz · Merton H. Miller · William F. Sharpe

Markowitz had shown in 1952 that investors could reduce risk by combining assets whose prices do not move together — the mathematics of portfolio diversification. Sharpe extended the framework to derive the Capital Asset Pricing Model, linking expected return to market risk. Miller, with Modigliani, contributed the theorem about capital structure. Between them they built the conceptual architecture of quantitative finance.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Fernando J. Corbató

Corbató led the development of CTSS at MIT in the early 1960s, the first system to let multiple users share a computer simultaneously — time-sharing, which made computing something that did not require booking in advance. He then led Multics, a more ambitious successor that directly influenced Unix, and through it almost every operating system that followed.

Fields Medal 1990

Fields Medal

Vladimir Drinfeld · Vaughan F. R. Jones · Shigefumi Mori · Edward Witten

At the Kyoto congress Drinfeld received the medal for quantum groups and number theory; Jones for a polynomial invariant of knots that turned out to have connections no one had anticipated to statistical mechanics; Mori for the minimal model program classifying three-dimensional algebraic varieties; and Witten for bringing string theory's mathematical machinery into topology — the first physicist to win the medal, to the mixed feelings of some mathematicians.

Hubble Space Telescope launched

On 24 April 1990 Discovery carried Hubble into low Earth orbit, and astronomers waited for the first images. The images were blurry: the primary mirror had been polished to the wrong prescription, a spherical aberration of 2.2 micrometres that was precise enough to be correctable but still a considerable embarrassment. Corrective optics installed in December 1993 restored the telescope's intended capability, and the images that followed changed what observational astronomy looked like.

Human Genome Project formally launched

On 1 October 1990 the NIH and Department of Energy signed the joint memorandum that formally started the Human Genome Project: a 15-year, $3 billion international effort to read all 3 billion base pairs of the human genome. Whether it would be possible was not yet certain; whether it would be useful was argued vigorously; it was completed in April 2003.

Magellan spacecraft begins radar mapping of Venus

On 10 August 1990 Magellan entered Venusian orbit and began its primary mission, mapping the planet's perpetually cloud-covered surface with synthetic-aperture radar. Over four years it covered more than 98 percent of the surface at 75-100 metre resolution, returning a portrait of a world dominated by volcanic plains, continent-sized highlands, and lava channels thousands of kilometres long.