2002

Centuries: 20th century - 21st century - 22nd century

Decades: 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s - 2000s - 2010s 2020s 2030s 2040s 2050s

Years: 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 - 2002 - 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

Months: January - Febrary - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December

International Year of Ecotourism and Mountains
National Science Year in the United Kingdom

Events:

January 1 - Introduction of Euro banknotes and coins in the European Union.
January 17 - Eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, displacing an estimated 400,000 people
January 20 - Inauguration of Churches Uniting in Christ
January 24 - Enron hearings begin and terrorist suspect John Walker Lindh's hearing begins.
February 3 - Costa Rica: elections for President and Congress
February 8 through February 24 - 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah
March 3 - Sao Tome and Principe: elections for the legislature
March 10 - Colombia: elections for the legislature; Togo: elections for the Parliament
March 17 - Portugal: elections for the Parliament
March 31 - Ukraine: elections for the Parliament
April 18 - New order of insects, Mantophasmatodea, announced.
April 30 - Pakistan: referendum on continuation of military government
May 15 - The Netherlands: elections for the Lower House
May 20 - restoration of East Timor independence
May 23 - first Eurovision Song Contest in a former soviet country, Estonia
May 31 through June 30 - 17th Football World Cup in Japan and South Korea
June 10 - Annular solar eclipse
October 16 George W. Bush signs the Iraq war resolution
December 4 - Total solar eclipse

Births:

Deaths:

January 3 - Freddy Heineken, former CEO of the beer brewery
January 4 - Antonio Todde (112), oldest man in the world at the time (from Thiana, Sardinia - Italy)
January 4 - Esquivel, musician
January 8 - Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's International
January 8 - Alexander Prochorow (65), Russian physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics 1964
January 13 - Cyrus Vance (84), former US Secretary of State (1977-1980)
January 13 - Ted Demme (37), film and television director (Blow, Beautiful Girls)
January 17 - Camilo Jose Cela (85), Spanish author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1989
January 21 - Peggy Lee, Jazz performer, most famous for song Fever ("You give me fever...")
January 22 - Jack Shea, American speed skater (double Olympic Champion 1932)
January 23 - Robert Nozick, (philosopher)
January 28 - Astrid Lindgren (94), Swedish author of many best selling children's novels (Pippi Longstocking, Ronia, the Robber's Daughter, The Brothers Lionheart)
February 1 - Hildegard Knef (76), actress, singer, writer
February 10 - Princess Margaret (71), sister of Queen Elizabeth II
February 10 - Harold Furth (72), American leader in plasma physics and nuclear fusion.
February 15 - Kevin Smith (38), actor
February 22 - Chuck Jones, animator
February 27 - Spike Milligan, comedian, writer, poet
March 11 - James Tobin, economist
March 27 - Milton Berle, comedian, actor
March 27 - Dudley Moore, comedian, actor
March 27 - Billy Wilder (96), film screenwriter and director
March 30 - Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (101), Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
April 12 - Elisa Breton (88), surrealist
April 18 - Thor Heyerdahl (87), Norwegian explorer on the Kon-Tiki expedition.
April 23 - Linda Boreman, aka Linda Lovelace, porn star
May 6 - Pim Fortuyn (54), Dutch politician
May 17 - Dave Berg (81), cartoonist for Mad Magazine
May 20 - Stephen Jay Gould (60), paleontologist/evolutionist
June 10 - John Gotti (61), Mafia boss
June 17 - Fritz Walter (81), German football player
June 22 - Esther Lederer (83), also known as Ann Landers, advice columnist
June 27 - John Entwistle (57), bassist for The Who
June 29 - Ole-Johan Dahl (70), computer scientist who invented concepts in object-oriented programming
July 5 - Ted Williams (83), member of the Baseball Hall of Fame and player for the Boston Red Sox
July 9 - Rod Steiger (77), actor
July 23 - Chaim Potok, novelist
August 5 - Chick Hearn, pro-basketball announcer
August 6 - Edsger Dijkstra, computer scientist
August 31 - Lionel Hampton (94), vibraphone virtuoso
September 11 - Johnny Unitas (69), NFL quarterback
September 21 - Robert Lull Forward (70), physicist and novelist
October 6 - Claus von Amsberg (76), husband of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands

Sport:

American football
- February 3 - Super Bowl XXXVI: New England Patriots (20) defeated St. Louis Rams (17)
Ice Hockey
- June - Stanley Cup: Detroit Red Wings (4 games) defeated Carolina Hurricanes (1 game)
Basketball
- June - NBA Finals: Los Angeles Lakers (4 games) defeated New Jersey Nets (0 games)
Soccer
- June 30 - FIFA World Cup: Brazil (2) defeated Germany (0) in final match
- May - Arsenal F.C. wins The Double

Nobel Prizes:

Peace: Jimmy Carter, 39th US president "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."
Literature: Imre Kertész, Hungarian writer "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".
Economic Sciences:
- Daniel Kahneman (Princeton University, USA) "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty".
- Vernon L. Smith (George Mason University, USA) "for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms"
Chemistry:
- John B. Fenn (Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA) and Koichi Tanaka (Shimadzu Corp., Kyoto, Japan) "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules"
- Kurt Wüthrich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA) "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution"
Physics:
- Raymond Davis Jr. (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA) and Masatoshi Koshiba (International Center for Elementary Particle Physics, University of Tokyo, Japan) "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos"
- Riccardo Giacconi (Associated Universities Inc., Washington DC, USA) "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources"
Physiology or Medicine:
- Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston "for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death"