Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/December 17
- 1706 - Birth of Émilie du Châtelet, French mathematician and physicist (d. 1749)
- 1778 - Birth of Sir Humphry Davy, English chemist and physicist (d. 1829)
- 1835 - Birth of Alexander Emanuel Agassiz, American scientist; son of Louis Agassiz
- 1900 - Birth of Mary Cartwright, English mathematician (d. 1998)
- 1907 - Death of William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Irish-born physicist (b. 1824)
- 1908 - Birth of Willard Frank Libby, American chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1980)
- 1920 - Birth of Kenneth E. Iverson, Canadian computer scientist (d. 2004)
- 1940 - Death of Alicia Boole Stott, Irish mathematician (b. 1860)
- 1964 - Death of Victor Franz Hess, Austrian-born physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1883)