Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/December 20
- 1494 - Birth of Oronce Finé, French mathematician (d. 1555)
- 1833 - Birth of Samuel Mudd, American physician (d. 1883)
- 1862 - Death of Robert Knox, Scottish surgeon, anatomist and zoologist (b. 1791)
- 1890 - Birth of Jaroslav Heyrovský, Czech chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1967)
- 1901 - Birth of Robert Van de Graaff, American physicist and inventor (d. 1967)
- 1917 - Birth of David Bohm, American-born physicist, philosopher, and neuropsychologist (d. 1992)
- 1951 - The EBR-1 in Arco, Idaho becomes the first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for the first time. The electricity powered four light bulbs
- 1956 - Death of Ramon Carrillo, Argentine neuroscientist and Public Health minister (b. 1906)
- 1998 - Death of Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, British scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1916)