Riess, Press, and Kirshner develop the multicolor light-curve shapes (MLCS) method, which allows precisely separating the intrinsic luminosity, distance, and dust extinction of type Ia supernovae from a training set of nine light curves with independently known distances and reddening. The method achieves a distance precision of 5% per object, turning SNe Ia into reliable standard candles for cosmology, and is the methodological basis explicitly cited by Riess et al. (1998) in the discovery of cosmic acceleration.