‘Our learned countryman’. Thomas Harriot and the Emergence of Mathematical Community in Seventeenth-Century England
Philip Beeley
Abstract
Thomas Harriot's considerable legacy as a mathematical scientist was secured for over 350 years posthumously and inaccurately by his friend Walter Warner, who not least because of the many flaws in Artis analyticae praxis (1631) has been treated rather scathingly by historians ever since. But who was Warner and how did he and other members of Harriot's circle such as Nathaniel Torporley and Robert Hues contribute to his contemporary image and archival memory? My essay turns the spotlight on Harriot's friends. Drawing on previously unpublished material, it considers their role in helping to create our vision of the man seen by some as a talisman-like figure in England's fledgling mathematical community in the seventeenth century.