Computer Science
- January – The Google web search engine originates as "BackRub", a research project using PageRank by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University, California.
- January 23 – The first version of the Java programming language is released.
- February 10 – Deep Blue defeats chess grand-master Garry Kasparov for the first time.
- Lov Grover, at Bell Labs, publishes the quantum database search algorithm.
- IRCnet is founded.
Read more about this topic: 1996 In Science
Famous quotes containing the words computer and/or science:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
““What we know, is a point to what we do not know.” Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)