Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/October 13
- 1687 – Death of Geminiano Montanari, Italian astronomer (b. 1633)
- 1773 - The Whirlpool Galaxy is discovered by Charles Messier
- 1820 – Birth of John William Dawson, Canadian geologist (d. 1899)
- 1821 – Birth of Rudolf Virchow, German physician, pathologist, biologist, and politician (d. 1902)
- 1884 - Greenwich is established as universal time meridian of longitude
- 1892 - Edward Emerson Barnard discovers D/1892 T1, the first comet discovered by photographic means, on the night of October 13-14
- 1917 - The "Miracle of the Sun" is witnessed by an estimated 70,000 people in the Cova da Iria in Fátima, Portugal
- 1954 – Birth of Mordechai Vanunu, Israeli nuclear technician
- 1976 - The first electron micrograph of an Ebola viral particle was obtained by Dr. F.A. Murphy, now at U.C. Davis, who was then working at the C.D.C.
- 1987 – Death of Walter Brattain, American physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1902)
- 2003 – Death of Bertram Brockhouse, Canadian physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1918)