The year 1682 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Astronomy

• A comet is observed, which later becomes known as Comet Halley, after Edmund Halley successfully predicts its return in 1758.

Discoveries

• Antony Van Leeuwenhoek discovers the banded pattern of muscle fibers.

Botany

• John Ray publishes his Methodus plantarum nova, which sets out his system to divide flowering plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons.

Exploration

• René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle canoes down the Mississippi River, naming the Mississippi basin Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV.

Medicine

• English naval surgeon James Yonge (1646–1721) publishes Wounds of the Brain Proved Curable, probably the first monograph in English on surgery of the head.

Births

• February 4 – Johann Friedrich Böttger, German alchemist and developer of porcelain manufacture (died 1719)
• February 25 – Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist (died 1771)
• March 24 – Mark Catesby, English naturalist (died 1749)
• April 16 – John Hadley, English mathematician (died 1744)
• July 10 – Roger Cotes, English mathematician (died 1716)

Deaths

• July 12 – Jean Picard, French astronomer (born 1620)
• October – J. J. Becher, German physician and chemist (born 1635)