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HARRIOT, or HARRIOTT, THOMAS (156o–1621)

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Originally appearing in Volume V13, Page 19 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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HARRIOT, or HARRIOTT, THOMAS (156o–1621)  ,
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English mathematician and astronomer, was born at Oxford in 156o . After studying at St Mary Hall, Oxford, he became tutor to
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Sir Walter Raleigh, who appointed him in 1585 to the office of geographer to the second expedition to Virginia . Harriot published an account of this expedition in 1588, which was afterwards reprinted in Hakluyt's Voyages . On his return to England, after an absence of two years, he resumed his mathematical studies, and having made the acquaintance of Henry Percy,
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earl of Northumberland, distinguished for his patronage of men of science, he received from him a yearly pension of £120 . He died at
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London on the 2nd of
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July 1621 . A
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manuscript of Harriot's entitled Ephemeris chrysometria is preserved in Sion College; and his Artis analyticae praxis ad aequationes algebraicas resolvendas was published at London in 1631 . His contributions to algebra are treated in the article ALGEBRA; Wallis's
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History of Algebra (1685) may also be consulted . From some papers of Harriot's, discovered in 1784, it would appear that he had either procured a
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telescope from Holland, or divined the construction of that instrument, and that he coincided in point of time with Galileo in discovering the spots on the sun's disk . See Charles Hutton, Mathematical and Philosophical
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Dictionary (1815), and J . E . Montucla, Histoire
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des malhematiques (1758) .

End of Article: HARRIOT, or HARRIOTT, THOMAS (156o–1621)
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