Scientific Linux would have been my first suggestion. Failing that anything Red Hat, Debian or Arch based might be good choices. Because they are distros that serve as the base for a lot of other distros and have huge software repositories, including a lot of scientific applications!
If you want something stable, CentOS (RHEL based and also used as the base for scientific Linux) might be a good choice. Or Debian stable.
If you want something more bleeding edge - perhaps Debian testing, Ubuntu/Mint, Fedora, or perhaps something Arch based?!
I think the scientific community usually go with Red hat based distros (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS).