1637 in science

Mathematics

• René Descartes promotes intellectual rigour in Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences and introduces the Cartesian coordinate system in its appendix La Géométrie.
• Pierre de Fermat conjectures Fermat's Last Theorem.

  Publications

• May – Chinese encyclopedist Song Yingxing publishes his Tiangong Kaiwu.

  Births

• February 12 – Jan Swammerdam, Dutch naturalist, pioneer of comparative anatomy and entomology
• François Mauriceau, French obstetrician

  Deaths

• June 24 – Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, French astronomer
• May 19 – Isaac Beeckman, Dutch philosopher and scientist
• Henry Gellibrand, English mathematician