Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot is a Mathématicien and Astronome English, born with Oxford in 1560 and deceased the July 2nd 1621 with London.

Biography

Raise Richard Hakluyt with the Université of Oxford, where he was laid off are arts (1582), Harriot exerted initially as cartographer, and it is for this reason that he took part in the forwarding of Walter Raleigh in Virginia (1585-86). It belonged to small the Colonie of Roanoke which is established this year in the Outer Banks, close to the Cap Hatteras. It explored and charted the Baie of Chesapeake (November 1585). It could return to England thanks to the forwarding of Francis Drake on Saint-Domingue (1586).

It developed a grammar algonquin, of which there remains only some layers. It published the account of its stay in its only book, has Briefe and True Report off the New Found Land off Virginia (1588).

As a geographer, he studied especially spherical trigonometry and establishes the mathematical theory of the projection that Gerardus Mercator had built only by approximate layouts.

He studied the algebra with John Dee with the beginning of the year 1590, and was filled with enthusiasm for this technique with the reading of the works of François Viète. Its notes, gathered after its death and published by his/her friends under the title of Artis Analyticæ Praxis (1632), and extremely appreciated John Wallis, played a crucial role in the algebraic tradition English.

Notorious atheist, protected from Walter Raleigh, then Count de Northumberland Henry Percy, specialists in history élisabéthaine (Bradbrook for example) suspected it of having been member of a École of the Night.

At the time of the Conspiracy of the powders (1605), he was imprisoned at the same time as the count de Northumberland, but obtained his release later one month. He made many experiments of weighing and chemistry, and corresponded with Johannes Kepler (1603-1610). He empirically obtained (about 1600) the law of the sines in optics, but did not publish it. Informed of the searchs for Galileo, it was the first in England to use a Telescope, with which it observed and drew the lunar craters and the evolutions of the planets médicéennes (1610-1611). It also drew the Sunspots, which it observed with the naked eye.

Thomas Harriot expressed into 1618 the primary symptoms of a cancer of the nasal fossae, of which it foot-note itself evolution until its death.

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