1657 in science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The year 1657 in science and technology involved some significant events.
Geography
- Peter Heylin publishes his Cosmographie, one of the earliest attempts to describe the entire world in English and the first known description of Australia.
Mathematics
- Christiaan Huygens writes the first book to be published on probability theory,[1] De ratiociniis in ludo aleae ("On Reasoning in Games of Chance").[2]
Medicine
- Walter Rumsey invents the provang, a baleen instrument which he describes in his Organon Salutis: an instrument to cleanse the stomach.[3][4]
Technology
- Christiaan Huygens patents his 1656 design for a pendulum clock and the first example is made for him by Salomon Coster at The Hague.[5]
- approx. date – The anchor escapement for clocks is probably invented by Robert Hooke.[6][7][8][9]
Institutions
- Accademia del Cimento established in Florence.[10]
Births
- February 11 – Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, French scientific populariser (died 1757)
- approx. date – Pierre-Charles Le Sueur, French fur trader and explorer (died 1704)
Deaths
- June 3 – William Harvey, English physician who discovered the circulation of blood (born 1578)
- June 16 – Fortunio Liceti, Italian Aristotelian scientific polymath (born 1577)
- September 23 – Joachim Jungius, German mathematician, logician and philosopher of science (born 1587)
- October 22 – Cassiano dal Pozzo, Italian scholar and patron (born 1588)
- November – John French, English physician and chemist (born c. 1616)