Merton and Scholes won the Nobel Prize in Economics (Fischer Black died in 1997) for the Black-Scholes equation, which describes the price of a financial derivative. The formula was subsequently used and abused, with the conditions for its validity being forgotten, contributing to subsequent financial crashes.

Comet Hale-Bopp passes by. At its peak, it loses 400 tons of water per second, about 100 times the amount Halley lost at its peak in 1986. Its nucleus is enormous: a full 30 km across. The spectacle in the sky is its two tails: one made of ions and one made of dust (I saw it!).

The SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project identifies a strong signal of possible alien origin, but this signal will never be repeated.

The Human Genome is mapped

Harrison and Thomas publish a study on the appeal and subsequent spread of conspiracy theories, referring to normal motivational processes and the ways in which we normally and continuously construct representations of the world by processing information about social reality.

DengXiaoPing dies, JiangZemin succeeds him

The sixth generation of CPUs is born: Intel Pentium II (7.5 million transistors), AMD-K6

Artificial Intelligence (AI): The LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) technique is invented: Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, which stores and forgets information about inputs, thus alleviating problems that plague RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks).

Bill Clinton confirmed at the White House

The University of Basilicata awards Rocco Petrone an honorary degree in mechanical engineering. This opportunity flatters Rocco Petrone in the States, but after some hesitation, partly due to his advanced age and partly due to an innate reluctance, he decides not to undertake the journey, preferring to retire to Palos Verdes Estates in Southern California, abandoning rockets, electronics, and computers to devote himself to his true passion: studying the American Civil War.

Intel Corp., in collaboration with the Department of Energy (DOE), announces that it has built a one-teraflop supercomputer.

Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs returns to Apple Computers Corp., 11 years after his departure. In late 1996, Apple announced its intention to bring cofounder Steve Jobs back into the fold, 11 years after he left the company, by acquiring his startup NeXT for $429 million. The following January, Jobs took the stage at Macworld Expo with then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio as the keynote speaker.

Earthquake in Emilia (VII on the Mercalli scale, 5.4 on the Richter scale), epicenter in Correggio

Partial solar eclipse

Feathered dinosaur fossils have been discovered. Confirmation is presented to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The species is named Sinosauropteryx (Chinese winged lizard).

President Clinton signs the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a total ban on nuclear testing, including underground testing. This signature is said to have been made possible by quantum-level modeling of the bomb and its surrounding environment on a supercomputer recently built at Sandia National Labs in New Mexico, as part of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) promoted by the Department of Energy (DOE).

Basic principles are discovered that make error protection possible for quantum computers, both classical bit-flips and superposition-destrying errors.

The Iraqi army’s invasion of Kurdish territory provokes retaliation from the United States.

General Aidid is killed in Somalia

Larry Page’s web crawler project, called BackRub, now uses half of Stanford University’s internet bandwidth. Page’s idea is simple and ingenious: use the same criteria used for scientific articles to rank the importance of a website—that is, count how many other web pages link to it. Sergey Brin is looking for a thesis topic and finds this project exciting. They’ll start Google together.

General Dynamics delivers the first Seawolf-class nuclear submarine (USS Seawolf SSN 21); the same class includes USS Connecticut (SSN 22), USS Jimmy Carter (SSN 23); the next in line is the Virginia class (USS Virginia SSN 774, delivered 2004, USS Texas SSN 775, delivered 2005, USS Hawaii SSN 776) (US Navy)

The Vatican promotes Darwinian evolution from “hypothesis” to “theory of science”

Monsanto researchers in France, looking for molecules similar to aspartame but without its allergenicity, discovered Neotame, 8,000 times sweeter than sugar.

Atlanta Olympics

Paul Gage and David Slowinski announced the discovery, using the Cray supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California, of their seventh record-breaking prime number: 2^1257787 – 1, a 378,632-digit number. From this point on, the era of supercomputer dominance ends and the era of applications distributed over the Internet begins via ordinary networked personal computers that use the user’s unused computing power.

The Ariane 5 launcher (ESA) explodes 37 seconds after launch due to a software bug on a recycled Ariane 4 launcher.

Hubble Space Telescope Observes First Deep Field

Russia. First and second rounds of elections. Boris Yeltsin wins the runoff with 64% of the vote to Zyuganov’s 41%. To prevent a communist return to power, Western governments, led by the United States, finance Yeltsin’s election campaign. This is the first time the American government has directly influenced the election outcome in Russia.

Huge amounts of money flow into Congo (formerly Zaire) for coltan (a tantalum and niobium-based mineral, highly sought after for the manufacture of cell phones). This was a country without a government and embroiled in an ongoing war. The years from 1996 to 2003 were the worst. In 2003, cell phone manufacturers realized they were indirectly fomenting a war, and they stopped buying coltan in Africa, turning instead to Australia, despite paying more. An official truce was signed in Congo in 2003, but things didn’t completely calm down. Nearly 5 million people died in Congo during this period in wars and guerrilla warfare, the worst massacre since World War II.

Congo (formerly Zaire) also holds 60% of the world’s coltan, a tantalum-niobium mineral highly sought after for the manufacture of cell phones. The rapidly rising demand for coltan, and the sudden, enormous availability of liquidity, are thus compounded by the ongoing, murky conflict, caused by the fall of the Rwandan government and the mass influx of Hutus into Congo seeking safety, reawakening ancient hatreds and resentments that will eventually involve nine nations and two hundred tribal groups.

The Rwandan government falls. Hutus flock to Congo in search of safety. The conflict soon spreads, involving nine nations and two hundred tribal groups, reawakening ancient hatreds and resentments. Congo (formerly Zaire) also possesses 60% of the world’s coltan, a tantalum and niobium mineral highly sought after for the manufacture of cell phones. The rapidly rising demand for coltan, and the sudden, enormous availability of liquidity, thus becomes intertwined with the ongoing, murky conflict.

Romano Prodi to government after the Olive Tree’s victory in the elections

First cases recognized of the deadly variant of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (vCJD), thought to be a consequence of BSE (mad cow disease).

Beginning of the mass application of genetically modified crops: in 6 years, crops will grow to 53 million hectares in 13 countries: USA, China, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Germany, Spain; mainly soybeans, corn, and rapeseed.

First fully decoded eukaryotic (cell with nucleus) genome: the yeast Saccharomyces Cervisiae

Comet Hyakutake Passage (I Saw It!)

Mission STS-75 with Italian astronauts Cheli and Guidoni on board; the Italian Tethered satellite is tested; the concept works, but the (American…) cable breaks.

United States. NASA’s NEAR probe, powered by a Delta II rocket, launches to explore the asteroid belt: Mathilde (June 27, 1997, a debris mass about 50 km in diameter) and Eros (December 20, 1999, an elongated body), on which it will land on February 12, 2001.

Yahya Ayyash, known as The Engineer, leader of Hamas, is killed by a cell phone packed with explosives

Galileo spacecraft launches probe that dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere and begins primary mission

22:04 UTC: The Galileo spacecraft probe plunges into Jupiter’s atmosphere at 170,000 km/h; it experiences 230 g of peak deceleration and its heat shield withstands temperatures of 14,000 degrees.

17:46 UTC: The Galileo probe passes just 892 km from Io and performs a flyby to slow down.

Steven Spielberg is the director of Schindler’s List

Sweden, Finland and Austria join the European Union

Tanzania’s first democratic elections lead to victory for Benjamin Mkapa of the former single-party coalition.

Toy Story by Pixar (Walt Disney) is the first film entirely made on the computer: it was born from the entrepreneurial ability of Steve Jobs and the directorial talent of John Lasseter; it will be a revolution in the world of cartoons comparable to that of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937.

Quebec Separatists Defeat: With a slim majority of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent, Quebec residents chose to remain a province of Canada. French-speaking Quebec has long considered itself culturally separate from the rest of Canada. The referendum posed the most serious threat to Canadian unity in the country’s 128-year history, and threatened the possibility of reducing Canada’s population by nearly a third if the “Oui” vote prevailed. Quebec separatists responded peacefully to their defeat.