1713 in science
The year 1713 in science and technology involved some significant events.
Astronomy
- John Rowley of London produces an orrery to a commission by Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery.
Mathematics
- September 9 – Nicolas Bernoulli first describes the St. Petersburg paradox in a letter to Pierre Raymond de Montmort.
- November 13 – James Waldegrave provides the first known minimax mixed strategy solution to a two-person game, in a letter to de Montmort.
- Jacob Bernoulli's best known work, Ars Conjectandi, is published posthumously by his nephew. It contains a mathematical proof of the law of large numbers, the Bernoulli numbers, and other important research in probability theory and enumeration.
Medicine
- William Cheselden publishes Anatomy of the Human Body and it becomes a popular work on anatomy, at least in part due to it being written in English rather than Latin.
- Italian Bernardino Ramazzini provides one of the first descriptions of task-specific dystonia in his book of occupational diseases, Morbis Artificum, noting in chapter II of its Supplementum that "Scribes and Notaries" may develop "incessant movement of the hand, always in the same direction... the continuous and almost tonic strain on the muscles... that results in failure of power in the right hand".
Physics
- The second edition of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica is published with an introduction by Roger Cotes and an essay by Newton titled General Scholium where he famously states "Hypotheses non fingo".
Technology
- Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit switches from using alcohol to mercury as the thermometric fluid in his thermometers, creating the first mercury-in-glass thermometer.
- Andrew Robinson builds the first ship called a schooner in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Births
- March 15 – Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, French astronomer
- May 3 – Alexis Claude Clairaut, French mathematician
- May 25 – John Stuart, Lord Mount Stuart, Scottish politician and botanist
- September 10 – John Needham, English biologist
- Anthony Addington, English physician
- Jean Paul de Gua de Malves, French mathematician
Deaths
- April 29 – Francis Hauksbee, English scientific instrument maker and experimentalist
- April – Edmund Dummer, English naval engineer
- July 7 – Henry Compton, English bishop and botanist
- August 26 – Denis Papin, French-born physicist, mathematician and inventor
- October 20 – Archibald Pitcairne, Scottish physician