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.[1]

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.[2]
Jacob Bernoulli's best known work, Ars Conjectandi (The Art of Conjecture), 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.

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" ("I feign no hypotheses").

Technology

(c. 1713) Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit switches from using alcohol to mercury as the thermometric fluid in his thermometers, creating the first mercury-in-glass thermometer.
Andrew Robins builds the first ship called a schooner in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Births

March 15 - Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, French astronomer (d. 1762)
May 3 - Alexis Claude Clairaut, French mathematician (d. 1765)
September 10 - John Needham, English biologist (d. 1781)
Jean Paul de Gua de Malves, French mathematician (d. 1785)

Deaths

April 29 (bur.) - Francis Hauksbee, English scientific instrument maker and experimentalist (born 1660)
October 20 - Archibald Pitcairne, Scottish physician (born 1652)

1713 Death of Thomas Tompion

References

^ "Orrery". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 3rd ed. 2001.
^ Walker, Paul (October 2005). "A Chronology of Game Theory". History of Game Theory. Retrieved 2012-05-12.