---
title: "List of multiple discoveries"
chunk: 6/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:44:22.470419+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

1967: The affine scaling method for solving linear programming was discovered by Soviet mathematician I.I. Dikin in 1967. It went unnoticed in the West for two decades, until two groups of researchers in the U.S. reinvented it in 1985. 1968: Neutral theory of molecular evolution was introduced by a Japanese biologist, Motoo Kimura, in 1968, and independently by two American biologists, Jack Lester King and Thomas Hughes Jukes, in 1969. 1969: Thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) structure was determined, and the hormone synthesized, independently by Andrew V. Schally and Roger Guillemin, who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Medicine. 1970: Howard Temin and David Baltimore independently discovered reverse transcriptase enzymes. The Knuth–Morris–Pratt string searching algorithm was developed by Donald Knuth and Vaughan Pratt and independently by J. H. Morris. 1971: The Cook–Levin theorem (also known as "Cook's theorem"), a result in computational complexity theory, was proven independently by Stephen Cook (1971 in the U.S.) and by Leonid Levin (1973 in the USSR). Levin was not aware of Cook's achievement because of communication difficulties between East and West during the Cold War. The other way round, Levin's work was not widely known in the West until around 1978. 1972: The Bohlen–Pierce scale, a harmonic, non-octave musical scale, was independently discovered by Heinz Bohlen (1972), Kees van Prooijen (1978) and John R. Pierce (1984). 1973: RSA, an algorithm suitable for signing and encryption in public-key cryptography, was publicly described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. An equivalent system had been described in 1973 in an internal document by Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, but his work was not revealed until 1997 due to its top-secret classification. 1973: Asymptotic freedom, which states that the strong nuclear interaction between quarks decreases with decreasing distance, was discovered in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek, and by David Politzer, and was published in the same 1973 edition of the journal Physical Review Letters. For their work the three received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. 1974: The J/ψ meson was independently discovered by a group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, headed by Burton Richter, and by a group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, headed by Samuel Ting of MIT. Both announced their discoveries on 11 November 1974. For their shared discovery, Richter and Ting shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics. 1975: Endorphins were discovered independently in Scotland and the US in 1975. 1975: Two English biologists, Robin Holliday and John Pugh, and an American biologist, Arthur Riggs, independently suggested that methylation, a chemical modification of DNA that is heritable and can be induced by environmental influences, including physical and emotional stresses, has an important part in controlling gene expression. This concept has become foundational for the field of epigenetics, with its multifarious implications for physical and mental health and for sociopolitics. 1976: Mevastatin (compactin; ML-236B) was independently discovered by Akira Endo in Japan in a culture of Penicillium citrinium and by a British group in a culture of Penicillium brevicompactum. Both reports were published in 1976. 1980: The asteroid cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out much life on Earth, including all dinosaurs except for birds, was published in Science by Luis and Walter Alvarez et al.; and independently 2 weeks earlier, in Nature, by Dutch geologist Jan Smit and Belgian geologist Jan Hertogen. 1980: Stigler's law of eponymy, stating that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer, was self-named for ironic effect by Stephen Stigler (1980), who acknowledged that this law had earlier been discovered by many others, including Henry Dudeney (1917). 1983: Two separate research groups led by American Robert Gallo and French investigators Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier independently declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting AIDS patients, and published their findings in the same issue of the journal Science. A third contemporaneous group, at the University of California, San Francisco, led by Dr. Jay Levy, in 1983 independently discovered an AIDS virus which was very different from that reported by the Montagnier and Gallo groups and which indicated, for the first time, the heterogeneity of HIV isolates. 1983: Neodymium magnets—independently developed by Sumitomo (Masato Sagawa) and GM (John J. Croat). 1984: Quantum cryptography—the first cryptographic method to rely not on mathematical complexity but on the laws of physics—was first postulated in 1984 by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, working together, and later independently, in 1991, by Artur Ekert. The earlier scheme has proven the more practical. 1984: Comet Levy-Rudenko was discovered independently by David H. Levy on 13 November 1984 and the next evening by Michael Rudenko. (It was the first of 23 comets discovered by Levy, who is famous as the 1993 co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the first comet ever observed crashing into a planet, Jupiter.)
1985: The use of elliptic curves in cryptography (elliptic curve cryptography) was suggested independently by Neal Koblitz and Victor S. Miller in 1985. 1987: The Immerman–Szelepcsényi theorem, another fundamental result in computational complexity theory, was proven independently by Neil Immerman and Róbert Szelepcsényi in 1987. 1989: Thomas R. Cech (Colorado) and Sidney Altman (Yale) won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their independent discovery in the 1980s of ribozymes – for the "discovery of catalytic properties of RNA" – using different approaches. Catalytic RNA was an unexpected finding, something they were not looking for, and it required rigorous proof that there was no contaminating protein enzyme. 1993: groups led by Donald S. Bethune at IBM and Sumio Iijima at NEC independently discovered single-wall carbon nanotubes and methods to produce them using transition-metal catalysts. 1994: The local average treatment effect (LATE) was first introduced in the econometrics literature  in 1994 by Guido W. Imbens and Joshua D. Angrist, who shared half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Stuart G. Baker and Karen S. Lindeman in 1994  independently published the LATE method for a binary outcome with the paired availability design and the key monotonicity assumption. An early version of LATE involved one-sided noncompliance (and hence no monotonicity assumption). In 1983 Baker wrote a technical report describing LATE for one-sided noncompliance that was published in 2016 in a supplement. In 1984, Bloom published a paper on LATE with one-sided compliance. A history of multiple discoveries involving LATE appears in Baker and Lindeman (2024). 1998: Saul Perlmutter, Adam G. Riess, and Brian P. Schmidt—working as members of two independent projects, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team—simultaneously discovered in 1998 the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae. For this, they were jointly awarded the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.