1657 in science

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, De ratiociniis in ludo aleae ("On Reasoning in Games of Chance").

Medicine

 * Walter Rumsey invents the provang, a baleen instrument which he describes in his Organon Salutis: an instrument to cleanse the stomach.

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.
 * approx. date – The anchor escapement for clocks is probably invented by Robert Hooke.

Institutions

 * Accademia del Cimento established in Florence.

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)