The year 1883 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

• Svante Arrhenius develops ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes.^[1][2]
• The Claus process is first patented by German chemist Carl Friedrich Claus.^[3]
• The Schotten–Baumann reaction is first described by chemists Carl Schotten and Eugen Baumann.

• August 26 – Krakatoa begins its final phase of eruptions at 1:06 pm local time. These produce a number of tsunami, mainly in the early hours of the next day, which result in about 36,000 deaths on the islands of Sumatra and Java. The final explosion at 10:02 am on August 27 destroys the island of Krakatoa itself and is heard up to 3000 miles away.
• Vasily Dokuchaev publishes Russian Chernozem.

• The concept and term Eugenics are formulated by Francis Galton.^[4]

• German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum identifies a disorder characterized by recurring mood cycles which he and his student Ewald Hecker name cyclothymia.^[5][6]
• Thomas Clouston publishes Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases.
• Emil Kraepelin publishes Compendium der Psychiatrie.
• Journal of the American Medical Association first published under this title.

• Robert Koch isolates Vibrio cholerae, the cholera bacillus.

• Osborne Reynolds popularizes use of the Reynolds number in fluid mechanics.^[7][8]

• May 24 – Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic in New York. Designed by John A. Roebling with project management assisted by his wife Emily, its main suspension span of 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.31 m) exceeds the previous record by 330 feet (100 m), and will not be surpassed for twenty years.
• Charles Fritts constructs the first solar cell using the semiconductor selenium on a thin layer of gold to form a device giving less than 1% efficiency.

• August 12 – The last quagga dies at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam.

• Copley Medal: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin^[9]
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Thomas Blanford

• January 4 – Johanna Westerdijk (died 1961), Dutch plant pathologist.
• February 10 – Edith Clarke (died 1959), American electrical engineer, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• March 4 – Julius Fromm (died 1945), German businessman, inventor known for the Condom machine
• May 5 – Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler (died 1966), American mathematician.
• May 13 – Georgios Papanikolaou (died 1962), Greek-born cytopathologist, inventor of the Pap smear.
• June 24 – Victor Francis Hess (died 1964), American physicist.
• July 15 – Orii Hyōjirō (died 1970), Japanese animal specimen collector.
• August 4 – Sydney Smith (died 1969), New Zealand-born forensic pathologist.
• August 6 – Constance Georgina Adams (died 1968), South African botanist.^[10]
• October 2 – Karl von Terzaghi (died 1963), Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
• October 8 – Otto Heinrich Warburg (died 1970), German physiologist, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

• January 23 – George Miller Beard (born 1839), American neurologist.
• April 10 - Maurice Krishaber (born 1836), naturalised French Hungarian otorhinolaryngologist.^[11]
• April 14 – William Farr (born 1807), English epidemiologist.
• April 28 – Rev. John Russell (born 1795), English dog breeder.
• May 13 – James Young (born 1811), Scottish chemist.
• June 18 – John Waterston (born 1811), Scottish physicist and civil engineer (drowned).
• June 26 – General Sir Edward Sabine (born 1788), Anglo-Irish physicist, astronomer and explorer.
• September 15 – Joseph Plateau (born 1801), Belgian physicist.
• December 8 – François Lenormant (born 1837), French assyriologist and numismatist.
• December 13 – John Stringfellow (born 1799), English pioneer of heavier-than-air flight.