1956 in science
The year 1956 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below. Biology March – Denham Harman proposes the free-radical theory of aging. Wesley K. Whitten reports developing eight-cell mouse ova to blastocyst stage in vitro. Climatology May – Gilbert Plass publishes his seminal article "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". Computer science July 13 – John McCarthy (Dartmouth), Marvin Minsky (MIT), Claude Shannon (Bell Labs) and Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) assemble the first coordinated research meeting on the topic of artificial intelligence, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. September 13 – The hard disk drive is invented by an IBM team led by Reynold B. Johnson. TX-0 transistorized computer completed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the United States. Mathematics February 1 – Joseph Kruskal publishes Kruskal's algorithm. December – Martin Gardner begins his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Henri Cartan and Samuel Eilenberg publish a text on homological algebra. Jean-Pierre Serre publishes his "GAGA" paper in algebraic geometry and analytic geometry. Medicine April – Humphry Osmond first proposes use of the word psychedelic to describe the effect of certain drugs, at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. May 1 –