Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution (@brlsi.bsky.social)

🔭 Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Astronomer, Navigator & Mathematician Ahead of his talk on 5 Dec 2025, Tony Symes shares why Thomas Harriot deserves far more recognition. 📖 Full Q&A + tickets... www.brlsi.org/whatso... #ThomasHarriot #RenaissanceScience #HistoryOfScience #AstronomyHistory

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Thomas Harriot: Renaissance astronomer, navigator & mathematician – Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution Thomas Harriot was not only the first in England to be documented as pointing a telescope at the night sky and draw the Moon (just before Galileo in Venice), but was also a navigator who had sailed to North America to set up the first English colony at Roanoke Island, had learnt the Carolina Algonquian language and had written a book about what he found: A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. When a portion of court intrigue and Harriot’s connections with other key Elizabethan and Jacobean figures is added in, the result is a story which needs to be told. Tony Symes is keen, as an enthusiastic amateur, to talk about this all too often forgotten scientist and reveal the background against which he was operating. Anthony Symes CEng is a committee member of the Herschel Society and chairs the Programme Subcommittee at the BRLSI. He graduated in Physics at the University of Sussex and worked in IT, mainly on supervisory control systems. https://www.brlsi.org/whatson/thomas-harriot-renaissance-astronomer-navigator-and-mathematician/#tribe-tickets__tickets-form