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,<ref>"I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably." —Christiaan Huygens, Letter to Pierre Perrault, 'Sur la préface de M. Perrault de son traité del'Origine des fontaines' [1763], Oeuvres Complétes de Christiaan Huygens (1897), Vol. 7, 298. Quoted in Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson and trans. Robert Ellrich (1997), 163. Quotation selected by W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds., 2005), Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations Template:ISBN p. 317 quotation 4.</ref> De ratiociniis in ludo aleae ("On Reasoning in Games of Chance").<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Medicine

• Walter Rumsey invents the provang, a baleen instrument which he describes in his Organon Salutis: an instrument to cleanse the stomach.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• approx. date – The anchor escapement for clocks is probably invented by Robert Hooke.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Institutions

• Accademia del Cimento established in Florence.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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)