Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/March 31
- 1596 - Birth of René Descartes, French mathematician (d. 1650)
- 1727 - Death of Sir Isaac Newton, English mathematician and physicist (b. 1643)
- 1730 - Birth of Étienne Bézout, French mathematician (d. 1783)
- 1777 - Birth of Charles Cagniard de la Tour, French physicist (d. 1859)
- 1778 - Birth of Coenraad Jacob Temminck, Dutch zoologist (d. 1858)
- 1811 - Birth of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, German chemist and inventor (d. 1899)
- 1847 - Birth of Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev, Russian mathematician (d. 1878)
- 1877 - Death of Antoine Augustin Cournot, French mathematician (b. 1801)
- 1884 - Birth of Adriaan van Maanen, Dutch-American astronomer (d. 1946)
- 1890 - Birth of Lawrence Bragg, English physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1971)
- 1903 - Richard Pearse allegedly makes a powered flight in an early aircraft
- 1906 - Birth of Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, Japanese physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1979)
- 1918 - Daylight saving time goes into effect in the United States for the first time
- 1934 - Birth of Carlo Rubbia, Italian physicist, Nobel laureate
- 1945 - Death of Hans Fischer, German chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1881)
- 1951 - The first commercial United States made computer, the UNIVAC I, is delivered to the United States Census Bureau
- 1978 - Death of Charles Best, Canadian medical scientist (b. 1899)
- 1994 - Human evolution: The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull
- 2001 - Death of Clifford Shull, American physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1915)