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,^[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)