1677 in science

Astronomy

• Publication of the first English star atlas, John Seller's Atlas Coelestis.

Mathematics

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz gives a complete solution to the tangent problem.
• Publication of Cocker's Arithmetick: Being a Plain and Familiar Method Suitable to the Meanest Capacity for the Full Understanding of That Incomparable Art, As It Is Now Taught by the Ablest School-Masters in City and Country, attributed to Edward Cocker. It will remain a standard grammar school textbook in England for more than 150 years.

Medicine

• January 21 – A pamphlet on smallpox published in Boston becomes the first medical publication in the British colonies in North America.

Microbiology

• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovers the spermatozoon.

Paleontology

• Robert Plot publishes The Natural History of Oxford-shire, Being an Essay Toward the Natural History of England, in which he describes the fossilised femur of a human giant, now known to be from the dinosaur Megalosaurus.

Births

• February 8 – Jacques Cassini, French astronomer
• September 17 – Stephen Hales, English physiologist and clergyman
• September 27 – Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, German mathematician, astronomer and cartographer

Deaths

• May 4 – Isaac Barrow, English mathematician
• May 23 – John Kersey, English mathematician
• October 11 – Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, Dutch-born drainage engineer.
• October 14 – Francis Glisson, English physician