Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot, who lived from about 1560 to 1621, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator to whom the theory of refraction is attributed. Born in Oxford, he attended St Mary Hall, Oxford, and was hired by Sir Walter Raleigh as a mathematics tutor and navigational adviser. He joined the 1585 expedition to Roanoke island, learned the Carolina Algonquian language from Wanchese and Manteo and devised a phonetic alphabet to write it, and published A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia in 1588, the only work he printed. He later worked for Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, at Syon House. He invented binary notation and arithmetic decades before Leibniz, though this stayed unknown until the 1920s, and on 5 August 1609 he made the first known drawing of the Moon through a telescope, about four months before Galileo. He remains obscure because he published so little.