1937 in science

The year 1937 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• June 8 – First total solar eclipse to exceed 7 minutes of totality in over 800 years; visible in the Pacific and Peru.

Biology

• September 27 – Last definite record of a Bali tiger shot.
• Meredith Crawford first publishes results of the cooperative pulling paradigm, with chimpanzees in the United States.
• Jay Laurence Lush publishes the influential textbook Animal Breeding Plans in the United States.
• The citric acid cycle is finally identified by Hans Adolf Krebs.

Chemistry

• Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè at the University of Palermo confirm discovery of the chemical element which will become known as Technetium.
• The opioid Methadone is synthesized in Germany by scientists working at Hoechst AG.
• Otto Bayer and his coworkers at IG Farben in Leverkusen, Germany, first make polyurethanes.

Computer science

• January – Alan Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers" first appears in print. Alonzo Church's review of it in Journal of Symbolic Logic introduces the term Turing machine.
• Claude Shannon's Master's thesis at MIT demonstrates that electronic application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical numerical relationship.
• Konrad Zuse submits patents in Germany based on his Z1 computer design anticipating von Neumann architecture.

Exploration

• British Graham Land Expedition (1934–1937) concludes its work, having determined that Graham Land is an integral part of the Antarctic Peninsula and not an independent archipelago.

Mathematics

• Bruno de Finetti publishes "La Prévision: ses lois logiques, ses sources subjectives" in Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré, his most influential treatment of his theorem on exchangeable sequences of random variables.
• Hans Freudenthal proves the Freudenthal suspension theorem in homotopy.
• Goldberg polyhedron first described.

Medicine

• November 2 – English chemist Montague Phillips at May & Baker synthesises sulphapyridine (M&B 693), an early antibiotic which immediately enters animal trials with Middlesex Hospital pathologist Lionel Whitby.
• First typhus vaccine by Rudolf Weigl, Ludwik Fleck and Hans Zinsser; influenza vaccine by Anatol Smorodintsev.
• Both respirator designed in Australia.
• Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti is the first to document a transorbital approach to the brain, which becomes the basis for the controversial medical procedure of transorbital lobotomy.
• Publication in the United Kingdom of Dr A. J. Cronin's novel The Citadel, promoting the cause of socialised medicine.

Physics

• January – Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen publish a paper denying that gravitational waves can exist.
• Eugene Wigner introduces the term isospin.

Technology

• February – Hans von Ohain begins ground-testing a turbojet engine.
• April 12 – Frank Whittle ground-tests the first jet engine designed to power an aircraft, at Rugby, England.
• May 28 – Rocker Shovel Loader patent applied for in the United States.
• June 5 – Alan Blumlein is granted a patent for an ultra-linear amplifier.
• December 13 – Tomlinson Moseley files the first patent for an electric toothbrush.
• Alec Reeves invents pulse-code modulation.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Clinton Joseph Davisson, George Paget Thomson
  • Chemistry – Walter Haworth, Paul Karrer
  • Medicine – Albert von Szent-Györgyi Nagyrapolt
• Copley Medal – Henry Dale
• Wollaston Medal for geology – Waldemar Lindgren

Births

• January 14 – Leo Kadanoff, American physicist (died 2015)
• January 26 – Igor Aleksander, Croatian computer scientist.
• February 18 – Chen Chuangtian (died 2018), Chinese materials scientist.
• March 16 – Amos Tversky (died 1996), Jewish American cognitive and mathematical psychologist, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
• April 17 – Don Buchla (died 2016), American electronic engineer, pioneer of sound synthesizers.
• May 9 – Alison Jolly (died 2014), American primatologist.
• May 13 – Trevor Baylis (died 2018), English inventor.
• June 8 – Bruce McCandless II (died 2017), American astronaut.
• June 9 – Harald Rosenthal, German biologist
• June 11 – David Mumford, American mathematician.
• June 21 – Averil Mansfield, English vascular surgeon.
• June 23 – Nicholas Shackleton (died 2006), English Quaternary geologist and paleoclimatologist, recipient of the Vetlesen Prize.
• June 26 – Robert Coleman Richardson (died 2013), American experimental physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• July 1 – Lydia Makhubu, Swazi chemist.
• July 19 – Bibb Latané, American social psychologist.
• July 26 – Ernest Vinberg (died 2020), Russian mathematician.
• August 2 – Coenraad Bron, Dutch computer scientist (d. 2006)
• September 8 – Edna Adan Ismail, Somali pioneer of pediatrics.
• December 26 – John Horton Conway, English-born mathematician (d. 2020)

Deaths

• January 28 – Arthur Pollen (born 1866), English inventor.
• January 29 – Aleen Cust (born 1868), Irish veterinary surgeon.
• February 5 – Lou Andreas-Salomé (born 1861), German psychoanalyst.
• May 28 – Alfred Adler (born 1870), Austrian psychotherapist.
• June 11 – R. J. Mitchell (born 1895), English aeronautical engineer.
• July 20 – Guglielmo Marconi (born 1874), Italian inventor.
• July 30 – Victor Despeignes (born 1866), French pioneer of radiation oncology.
• October 16 – William Sealy Gosset (born 1876), English statistician.
• October 19 – Ernest Rutherford (born 1871), New Zealand-born British physicist and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• November 23 – Jagadish Chandra Bose (born 1858), Bengali physicist.