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| 1688 |
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| Francesco Redi (1621–97) challenged the ancient belief in spontaneous generation and began a two-century-long debate on the subject by his controlled experimentation on the production of maggots. | 1 |
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| 1690 |
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| Christiaan Huygens developed in his Traité de la lumière a mechanistic theory that presents light as a propagation of impulses in a subtle ether. He used this theory to explain reflection, refraction, and double refraction. | 2 |
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| 1696 |
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| Guillaume de L'Hôpital (1661–1704) published the first textbook of the infinitesimal calculus, Analyse des infiniment petits, based on the lectures of his teacher, Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748). | 3 |
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| 1697 |
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| Bernoulli showed that the curve of quickest descent is the cycloid, thereby solving the first problem of the calculus of variations. (See Science and Technology) (See Intellectual Developments) | 4 |
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