Timeline of scientific discoveries

The timeline below shows the date of publication of possible major scientific breakthroughs, theories and discoveries, along with the discoverer.

The timeline begins at the Bronze Age, as it is difficult to give even estimates for the timing of events prior to this, such as of the discovery of counting, natural numbers and arithmetic.

Many early innovations of the Bronze Age were prompted by the increase in trade, and this also applies to the scientific advances of this period.

For context, the major civilizations of this period are Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, with Greece rising in importance towards the end of the third millennium BC.

The Indus Valley script remains undeciphered and there are very little surviving fragments of its writing, thus any inference about scientific discoveries in that region must be made based only on archaeological digs.

The Nippur cubit-rod, c. 2650 BCE, in the Archeological Museum of Istanbul , Turkey
Pāṇini 's Aṣṭādhyāyī , an early Indian grammatical treatise that constructs a formal system for the purpose of describing Sanskrit grammar.
Diophantus' Arithmetica (pictured: a Latin translation from 1621) contained the first known use of symbolic mathematical notation. Despite the relative decline in the importance of the sciences during the Roman era, several Greek mathematicians continued to flourish in Alexandria .
Fragment of papyrus with clear Greek script, lower-right corner suggests a tiny zero with a double-headed arrow shape above it
Example of the early Greek symbol for zero (lower right corner) from a 2nd-century papyrus
The age of Imperial Karnataka was a period of significant advancement in Indian mathematics.