Timeline February 2001

Events in February 2001 12

• 1908 – 2001 Balthus (1908-2001) Died 18 February 2001, aged 92 Balthus, born Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola, was a figurative painter who worked against the grain of twentieth-century abstraction. His canvases of interiors and adolescent girls were admired for their composition and unsettling for their subject matter. He directed the French Academy in Rome for many years.
• 1913 – 2001 Stanley Kramer (1913-2001) Died 19 February 2001, aged 87 Kramer was a producer and director known for message films on racism, nuclear war and the Holocaust, including The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Critics were divided on his earnestness, but his films reached wide audiences. He received the Irving G. Thalberg award.
• 1916 – 2001 Claude Shannon (1916-2001) Died 24 February 2001, aged 84 Shannon was a mathematician and engineer whose 1948 paper founded information theory and introduced the bit as the unit of information. His earlier master's thesis had shown how Boolean algebra could describe electrical circuits. His ideas underpin all modern digital communication.
• 1916 – 2001 Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) Died 9 February 2001, aged 84 Simon was a polymath who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of bounded rationality in decision-making. He was also a founder of the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He spent most of his career at Carnegie Mellon University.
• 1922 – 2001 Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) Died 4 February 2001, aged 78 Xenakis was a composer and architect who applied mathematical models, game theory and probability to music. Trained as an engineer, he worked with Le Corbusier before turning to composition. Works such as Metastaseis reshaped ideas of orchestral texture.
• 1951 – 2001 Dale Earnhardt (1951-2001) Died 18 February 2001, aged 49 Earnhardt was among the most successful and popular drivers in NASCAR, winning seven Winston Cup championships and known as The Intimidator. He was killed in a last-lap crash at the Daytona 500. His death led to mandatory head-and-neck restraints in the sport.
• 2001 El Salvador earthquakes Two major quakes a month apart kill over a thousand A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off the coast of El Salvador on 13 January 2001, followed by a magnitude 6.6 quake on 13 February. Landslides buried neighbourhoods, notably in Santa Tecla. More than 1,100 people died and hundreds of thousands were left homeless.
• 2001 "Aida" wins Grammy With Tim Rice His and Tim Rice's musical "Aida" won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album in February 2001; at the ceremony, John performed alongside rapper Eminem — a performance that drew criticism from some LGBT advocates given Eminem's lyrics.
• 2001 Ariel Sharon elected Prime Minister of Israel Likud leader defeats Ehud Barak in a landslide Ariel Sharon won a special election for prime minister on 6 February 2001, defeating the incumbent Ehud Barak amid the violence of the Second Intifada. He formed a broad unity government and took a hard line on security. He remained in office until incapacitated by a stroke in 2006.
• 2001 First draft of the human genome published Public and private teams release the sequence In February 2001 the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and the company Celera published separate draft sequences of the human genome in Nature and Science. The drafts covered roughly 90 percent of the genome. The work opened a new era of genetic medicine and research.
• 2001 NEAR Shoemaker lands on asteroid Eros First spacecraft to touch down on an asteroid On 12 February 2001 NASA's NEAR Shoemaker probe descended onto the near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. It kept transmitting data from the surface after touchdown. The mission had orbited Eros for a year beforehand.
• 2001 Foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Britain Millions of livestock culled to halt the virus An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease confirmed in February 2001 spread across British farms, leading to the slaughter of more than six million sheep, cattle and pigs. Pyres of burning carcasses became a defining image of the year. Rural tourism suffered heavily and the general election was postponed by a month.