Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/April 17
- 1492 - Spain and Christopher Columbus sign a contract for him to sail to Asia to get spices
- 1598 - Birth of Giovanni Riccioli, Italian astronomer (d. 1671)
- 1761 - Death of Thomas Bayes, English mathematician
- 1794 - Birth of Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, German botanist (d. 1868)
- 1798 - Birth of Étienne Bobillier, French mathematician (d. 1840)
- 1863 - Birth of Augustus Edward Hough Love, English mathematician (d. 1940)
- 1942 - Death of Jean Perrin, French physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1870)
- 1976 - Death of Henrik Dam, Danish biochemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1895)
- 1994 - Death of Roger Wolcott Sperry, American neurobiologist, Nobel laureate (b. 1913)