1682 in science
The year 1682 in science and technology involved some significant events.Astronomy
- A comet is observed, which later becomes known as Comet Halley, after Edmund Halley successfully predicts its return in 1758.
Discoveries
- Antony Van Leeuwenhoek discovers the banded pattern of muscle fibers.
Botany
- John Ray publishes his Methodus plantarum nova, which sets out his system to divide flowering plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons.
Exploration
- René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle canoes down the Mississippi River, naming the Mississippi basin Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV.
Medicine
- English naval surgeon James Yonge publishes Wounds of the Brain Proved Curable, probably the first monograph in English on surgery of the head.
Births
- February 4 – Johann Friedrich Böttger, German alchemist and developer of porcelain manufacture
- February 25 – Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist
- March 24 – Mark Catesby, English naturalist
- April 16 – John Hadley, English mathematician
- July 10 – Roger Cotes, English mathematician
Deaths
- July 12 – Jean Picard, French astronomer
- October – J. J. Becher, German physician and chemist
