author
Thomas Harriot
1560–1621
A quietly brilliant figure of the English Renaissance, this mathematician and astronomer also helped shape early English exploration in North America. He is remembered for work that ranged from algebra and optics to some of the earliest telescopic observations of the Moon.
1 Audiobook
A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
by Thomas Harriot
About the author
Born around 1560 and educated at Oxford, Thomas Harriot was an English mathematician, astronomer, and natural philosopher whose interests stretched across science, navigation, and language. He worked under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh and later Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, which gave him the freedom to pursue a remarkably wide range of studies.
Harriot took part in the world of exploration as well as scholarship. He was connected with Raleigh’s plans for English voyages to the Americas and traveled to the Roanoke colony in the 1580s. From that experience came A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, a vivid early account of the region and its peoples that helped shape English understanding of the New World.
Although much of his work was not published in his lifetime, Harriot’s reputation has steadily grown. He made important contributions to algebra, studied optics and refraction, and carried out some of the earliest recorded telescopic observations in England, including drawings of the Moon. He died in London on July 2, 1621, leaving behind the image of a deeply original thinker whose influence reached far beyond the small circle that knew his work firsthand.