1683 in science
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The year 1683 in science and technology involved some significant events.
Geography
- Vincenzo Coronelli completes terrestrial and celestial globes for Louis XIV of France.
Biology
- September 17 – Antonie van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to the Royal Society of London describing "animalcules" – the first known description of protozoa.[1]
Mathematics
- Based on his discovery of the resultant, Seki Takakazu starts to develop elimination theory in the Kai-fukudai-no-hō (解伏題之法,); and to express the resultant, he develops the notion of the determinant.[2]
- Jacob Bernoulli discovers the mathematical constant e.[3]
Medicine
- Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne publishes Dissertatio de Arthritide: Mantissa Schematica: De Acupunctura in London, introducing the West to acupuncture and moxibustion.
Technology
- Vauban's manual on fortification, Le Directeur-Général des fortifications, begins publication at The Hague.
Institutions
- May 24 – The Ashmolean Museum opens in Broad Street, Oxford (England) as the world's first purpose-built university museum,[4] including accommodation for the teaching of natural philosophy and a chemistry laboratory. Naturalist Dr. Robert Plot is the first keeper and first professor of chemistry.
- October 15 – First meeting of the Dublin Philosophical Society, established by William Molyneux.[5][6][7]
Births
- February 28 – Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, French physicist (died 1757)
- December 23 – François Nicole, French mathematician (died 1758)
- Approximate date
- Giovanni Poleni, Italian mathematician and physicist (died 1761)
- Edmund Weaver, English astronomer (died 1748)
Deaths
- May 2 – Stjepan Gradić, Ragusan polymath (born 1613)
- November 10
- John Collins, English mathematician (born 1625)
- Robert Morison, Scottish botanist (born 1620)