Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/March 4
- 1493 - Explorer Christopher Columbus arrives back in Lisbon, Portugal aboard his ship Niña from his discovery voyage to America. He returned to Spain on March 15
- 1774 - First sighting of Orion Nebula by William Herschel
- 1792 - Birth of Samuel Slocum, American inventor (d. 1861)
- 1822 - Birth of Jules Antoine Lissajous, French mathematician (d. 1880)
- 1835 - Birth of John Hughlings Jackson, English neurologist (d. 1911)
- 1847 - Birth of Karl Bayer, Austrian chemist (d. 1904)
- 1853 - Death of Christian Leopold von Buch, German geologist (b. 1774)
- 1854 - Birth of Sir Napier Shaw, British meteorologist (d. 1945)
- 1859 - Birth of Alexander Stepanovich Popov, Russian physicist (d. 1905)
- 1862 - Birth of Jacob Robert Emden, Swiss astrophysicist and meteorologist (d. 1940)
- 1863 - Birth of Reginald Innes Pocock, British zoologist (d. 1947)
- 1871 - Birth of Boris Galerkin, Russian mathematician (d. 1945)
- 1881 - Birth of Richard C. Tolman, American mathematical physicist (d. 1948)
- 1887 - Gottlieb Daimler unveils his first automobile which he test runs in Esslingen and Cannstatt, Germany
- 1889 - Birth of Oscar Chisini, Italian mathematician (d. 1967)
- 1903 - Birth of William C. Boyd, American immunochemist (d. 1983)
- 1904 - Birth of George Gamow, Ukrainian-born physicist (d. 1968)
- 1910 - Death of Knut Ångström, Swedish physicist (b. 1857)
- 1914 - Birth of Robert R. Wilson, American physicist, sculptor and architect (d. 2000)
- 1923 - Birth of Sir Patrick Moore, British astronomer
- 1927 - Death of Ira Remsen American chemist (b. 1846)
- 1934 - Birth of Janez Strnad, Slovenian physicist
- 1952 - Death of Charles Scott Sherrington, English scientist, Nobel laureate (b. 1857)
- 1962 - United States Atomic Energy Commission announces that the first atomic power plant at McMurdo Station in Antarctica is in operation
- 1967 - Death of Michel Plancherel, Swiss mathematician (b. 1885)
- 1973 - Death of Samuel Tolansky, British scientist and expert on spectroscopy (b. 1907)
- 1976 - Death of Walter H. Schottky, German physicist (b. 1886)
- 1977 - The first Cray-1 supercomputer is shipped to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico
- 1997 - Death of Robert H. Dicke, American physicist (b. 1916)
- 2004 - Death of George Pake, American physicist (b. 1924)
- 2006 - Final contact attempt with Pioneer 10 by the Deep Space Network. No response was received