It has been designated Alan Turing Year, commemorating the mathematician, computer pioneer, and code-breaker on the centennial of Turing's birth.
There are a variety of popular beliefs about the year 2012 that range from the spiritually transformative to the apocalyptic.
Predicted and scheduled events
January
- January 13–22 – The first Winter Youth Olympics will be held in Innsbruck, Austria.
- January 31 – 433 Eros, the second-largest Near Earth Object on record (size 13×13×33 km) will pass Earth at 0.1790 astronomical units (26,778,019 km; 16,639,090 mi). NASA studied Eros with the NEAR Shoemaker probe launched on February 17, 1996.
February
- February 5 – Super Bowl XLVI will be played at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana.
- February 6 – Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II marking the 60th anniversary of her accession to the Thrones of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia & New Zealand (as well as the 60th anniversary of her becoming Head of the Commonwealth), if she's alive and Monarch at the time.
March
- March 22 – Unless the European Council votes to extend current copyright law, The Beatles' debut album, Please Please Me, will fall out of copyright.
April
- April 17 – The United States will cede wartime control of the military of the Republic of Korea after 50 years and dissolve the Combined Forces Command. Two distinct military commands (South Korea and the United States) will operate in Korea during wartime, rather than one unified command under the Combined Forces Command.
May
- May 20 – Annular solar eclipse, a Sunday. Path of annularity runs through the Pacific Ocean from northern China to California.
June
- June 6 – The second and last solar transit of Venus of the century. The next pair is predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125.
- June 9 – July 1 – The UEFA Euro 2012 will be played in Poland and Ukraine.
- June 18 – June 23 – Turing Centenary Conference at the University of Cambridge, in honor of the mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer Alan Turing, the last day of the conference being the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
July
- July 18–21 – The 2012 World Rowing Championships will be held at Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
- July 27 – Opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics begins in London at 7:30 pm UTC, 8:30pm BST.
August
- August 12 – Closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, a Sunday.
- August 29 – Start of the 2012 Summer Paralympics.
November
- November 6 – United States presidential, Senate, and House of Representatives elections.
- November 13 – Total solar eclipse (visible in northern Australia and the South Pacific).
- November 28 – Penumbral lunar eclipse.
December
- December 3 – Jupiter in opposition.
- December 17 – Members of the Electoral College meet in each U.S. state.
- December 21 – 11:11 UTC. Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.
- December 21 – The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, notably used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization among others, completes a "great cycle" of thirteen b'ak'tuns (periods of 144,000 days each) since the mythical creation date of the calendar's current era. On this day the Long Count date at creation—written 13.0.0.0.0 in modern notation, equivalent to August 11, 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar—is repeated for the first time in a span of a little over 5,125 solar years. The completion of this cycle and the repetition of the previous Creation's Long Count ending date have been central to the 2012 phenomenon. Academic researchers have not concluded that the ancient Maya themselves attached similar significance to this point in time.
- December 23 – An alternative date for the completion of the thirteenth B'ak'tun in the Long Count calendar, calculated using another version of the GMT correlation which is supported by a few Mayanist researchers.
- December 31 – The Kyoto Protocol will expire.
