Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot (c. 1560–1621) was an Oxford-educated mathematician, astronomer and navigator employed by Sir Walter Raleigh as his mathematics tutor. He joined the 1585 expedition to Roanoke, learned the local Algonquian language, and in 1588 published A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, his only printed work.

Under the Earl of Northumberland's patronage he was credited with discovering the law of refraction and devised binary arithmetic decades before Leibniz. On 5 August 1609 he made the first known drawing of the Moon through a telescope, preceding Galileo. He died in 1621, leaving most of his work unpublished.