Thomas Harriot

As Robyn Arianrhod shows in this new biography, the most complete to date, Thomas Harriot was a pioneer in both the figurative and literal sense. Navigational adviser and loyal friend to Sir Walter Ralegh, Harriot--whose life was almost exactly contemporaneous to Shakespeare's--took part in the first expedition to colonize Virginia in 1585. Not only was he responsible for getting Ralegh's ships safely to harbor in the New World, he was also the first European to acquire a working knowledge of an indigenous language from what is today the US, and to record in detail the local people's way of life. In addition to his groundbreaking navigational, linguistic, and ethnological work, Harriot was the first to use a telescope to map the moon's surface, and, independently of Galileo, recorded the behavior of sunspots and discovered the law of free fall. He preceded Newton in his discovery of the properties of the prism and the nature of the rainbow, to name just two more of his unsung "firsts." Indeed many have argued that Harriot was the best mathematician of his age, and one of the finest experimental scientists of all time. Yet he has remained an elusive figure. He had no close family to pass down records, and few of his letters survive. Most importantly, he never published his scientific discoveries, and not long after his death in 1621 had all but been forgotten. In recent decades, many scholars have been intent on restoring Harriot to his rightful place in scientific history, but Arianrhod's biography is the first to pull him fully into the limelight. She has done it the only way it can be done: through his science. Using Harriot's re-discovered manuscripts, Arianrhod illuminates the full extent of his scientific and cultural achievements, expertly guiding us through what makes them original and important, and the story behind them. Harriot's papers provide unique insight into the scientific process itself. Though his thinking depended on a more natural, intuitive approach than those who followed him, and who achieved the lasting fame that escaped him, Harriot helped lay the foundations of what in Newton's time would become modern physics. Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science puts a human face to scientific inquiry in the Elizabethan and Jacobean worlds, and at long last gives proper due to the life and times of one of history's most remarkable minds.

Great classic of Americana, fascinating for European image of America. 1590 edition with 28 engravings by de Bry (from John White) of Indian villages, activities, dress, more.

This volume assembles ten studies of the life and work of Thomas Harriot (1560-1621). These are based on lectures that have been given annually at Oriel College, Oxford since 1990, by such authorities as Hugh Trevor Roper, David Quinn and John D. North. An astronomer and mathematician whose activities embraced not only science but also philosophical debate and an engagement in the early exploration of America, Harriot occupied a prominent place in intellectual and public life. He was well read in the contemporary literature of science, and his writings on algebra, his correspondence, and his early observations with the telescope, undertaken at the same time as Galileo’s, brought him to the attention of leading men of science both in Britain and abroad. Recent scholarship has enhanced historians’ appreciation of Harriot’s achievements and of the scientific context and social milieu in which he worked, a milieu distinguished by his friendship with Walter Ralegh and the Ninth Earl of Northumberland (the ’Wizard Earl’ whose association with the Gunpowder Plot led to many years of imprisonment in the Tower). The contributions to Thomas Harriot. An Elizabethan man of science shed new light on all the main aspects of Harriot’s life and stand as an important contribution to the re-evaluation of one of the most gifted and intriguing figures in early modern British science.

Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) was a mathematician and astronomer who founded the English school of algebra. He is known not only for his work in algebra and geometry but also as a prolific writer with wide-ranging interests in ballistics, navigation, and optics. (He discovered the sine law of refraction now known as Snell's law.) By about 1614, Harriot had developed finite difference interpolation methods for navigational tables. In 1618 (or slightly later) he composed a treatise entitled `De numeris triangularibus et inde de progressionibus arithmeticis, Magisteria magna', in which he derived symbolic interpolation formulae and showed how to use them. This treatise was never published and is here reproduced for the first time. Commentary has been added to help the reader follow Harriot's beautiful but almost completely nonverbal presentation. The introductory essay preceding the treatise gives an overview of the contents of the `Magisteria' and describes its influence on Harriot's contemporaries and successors over the next sixty years. Harriot's method was not superseded until Newton, apparently independently, made a similar discovery in the 1660s. The ideas in the `Magisteria' were spread primarily through personal communication and unpublished manuscripts, and so, quite apart from their intrinsic mathematical interest, their survival in England during the seventeenth century provides an important case study in the dissemination of mathematics through informal networks of friends and acquaintances.

This second volume of papers on Thomas Harriot edited by Professor Robert Fox is based on the annual Harriot lectures delivered at Oriel College, Oxford between 2000 and 2009. It complements the previous volume, published as Thomas Harriot: An Elizabethan Man of Science in 2000. The focus in several of the papers is on Harriot's outstanding achievements as a mathematician; others consider why he has never received the recognition accorded to his great contemporary, Galileo; others again examine his association with his entrepreneurial patron Walter Ralegh and his contributions to the intensely practical world of exploration and seamanship, as exemplified in his voyage to the coast of present-day North Carolina in 1585. The volume adds significantly to our understanding of a true Renaissance man who wrote accomplished Latin, earned the respect of Europe's leading mathematicians and astronomers, and moved easily in circles close to the English court and whose 'Brief and true report of the new found land of Virginia' (1588) was the first detailed description of America to be published in the English language.

This volume sheds new light on one of the most remarkable polymaths of the English Renaissance. It offers original perspectives not only on Harriot’s personal achievements in mathematics and natural philosophy but also on the wider realms of exploration, colonial ambition, and philosophical debate in which he earned the attention and respect of contemporaries in and far beyond the socially elevated circles of his two great patrons, first Walter Ralegh and then Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland. Harriot’s sixteenth-century world was one of unprecedented expansion in both scientific understanding and the discovery of new lands and peoples. The essays gathered here bring out forcefully the effect of this expanding vision, encapsulated in Harriot’s Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1588), the first detailed description of America to be published in the English language. In addition to an essay by a recent biographer of Harriot, the volume contains reworked versions of seven Thomas Harriot Lectures, an annual lecture series inaugurated in 1990 in Oriel College, Oxford. It follows two earlier volumes of Harriot Lectures, also edited by Robert Fox, that appeared in 2000 and 2012.

This is the first English translation of Thomas Harriot’s seminal Artis Analyticae Praxis, first published in Latin in 1631. It has recently become clear that Harriot's editor substantially rearranged the work, and omitted sections beyond his comprehension. Commentary included with this translation relates to corresponding pages in the manuscript papers, enabling exploration of Harriot's novel and advanced mathematics. This publication provides the basis for a reassessment of the development of algebra.