Thomas Harriot (Person) AKA Harriott, Hariot or Heriot
Thomas Harriot
1560 AD - 1621 AD
AKA Harriott, Hariot or Heriot
English mathematician and scientist Thomas Harriot was the first person to draw the surface of the Moon as seen through a telescope. He also made many other achievements for which he was not credited until recently since he did not publicize his work.
He was also first to view and draw the sunspots. He first translated the Carolina Algonquian language into English and served as a translator during early exploration of that region.He discovered, contemporaneously with Galileo, the four main moons of Jupiter. He proposed contemporaneously with Kepler, that planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular. In the field of optics, he discovered Snell's Law of Refraction twenty years before Snell. In algebra, he was the first to introduce negative square roots (imaginary numbers) and the now common "<" and ">" symbols meaning "less than" and "greater than" respectivelyy.
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