Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot (about 1560 to 1621) was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator, and his place in computing is binary arithmetic. His surviving papers show that he invented binary notation and arithmetic several decades before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but this remained unknown until the 1920s because he published almost nothing, apart from his report on the English settlement in Virginia. He studied at St Mary Hall, Oxford, worked for Sir Walter Raleigh as a mathematics tutor and navigational expert, and later worked for the Earl of Northumberland. He also drew the Moon through a telescope in 1609. In this atlas he is an early theorist of number representation.