Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot (born 1560, Oxford, Eng.—died July 2, 1621, London) was a mathematician, astronomer, and investigator of the natural world.

Little is known of him before he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford in 1580. Throughout his working life, he was supported by the patronage, at different times, of Sir Walter Raleigh and Henry Percy, the 9th earl of Northumberland; he was never, after his student years, affiliated with an academic institution or commercial organization. From 1585 to 1586 he participated in Raleigh’s colony on Roanoke Island, and he may have visited Virginia as early as 1584; upon his return, he published A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). This was his only work published during his lifetime. Very soon after the Virginia sojourn, Harriot was living on and surveying Raleigh’s estates in Ireland.

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In 1595 Percy settled upon Harriot an estate in Durham, England, and soon provided him with a house near London, which he also used as a scientific laboratory to pursue original research in astronomy, meteorology, optics, and what are now characterized as pure and applied mathematics. In particular, he performed experiments in ballistics and the refraction of light. He was one of the first, if not the first, to consider the imaginary roots of equations. Much of his earliest as well as latest mathematical work bore on questions of navigation, including such issues as the construction of rhumb lines (or loxodromes) on sailing charts. He also devised a novel form of cross-staff, an early navigational instrument. (See navigation: latitude measurements.) Although, after his early voyages, he pursued a life of research, it was not a life free of turmoil, since his principal patron, Raleigh, was imprisoned in 1603 in the Tower of London on orders of King James I of England. Harriot witnessed Raleigh’s execution in 1618. In the turmoil following the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, Harriot was arrested upon suspicion of having cast the king’s horoscope, though he was soon released. (Percy, as a co-conspirator in the plot, joined Raleigh in the Tower of London.) From the early 1590s, Harriot had developed a reputation for atheism and was referred to rather obliquely as a conjurer by Raleigh’s enemies. However, there is nothing in Harriot’s writings or those of his friends to substantiate any non-Christian beliefs; the accusations may merely reflect his likely belief in atomism, which at the time was considered by some to obviate the necessity for the existence of God.

Concurrently with Galileo Galilei’s introduction of telescopic observations of the heavens in 1609, Harriot commenced telescopic observations, some systematic, others not. He drew charts of the Moon, followed the paths of the moons of Jupiter, and observed sunspots. He also observed comets.

During his lifetime Harriot was known in England among the philosophically inclined, and his reputation extended to the continent to the extent that the astronomer Johannes Kepler initiated a correspondence with him. His only other book, however, was the posthumously published Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas (1631; “Application of Analytical Art to Solving Algebraic Equations”). (The editor of this work introduced the signs ∙ for multiplication, > for greater than, and < for less than.) Although Harriot published little and kept some of his studies secret, such as the discovery of the sine law of refraction (now known as Snell’s law), his work was not done in isolation; he drew around himself a group of admiring scholars, at least some of whom were cognizant of some of his discoveries. In subsequent centuries Harriot was never forgotten, but it has been mainly since the mid-20th century that scholars have made close and systematic studies of his thousands of pages of manuscripts and uncovered the full extent of his investigations.