title: 1683 in science
text: # 1683 in science
  
  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.
  
  ## 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.
  * Jacob Bernoulli discovers the mathematical constant e.
  
  ## 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, 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.
  
  ## 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)
  