Apr 30, 2019
Episode 109: The Curiosities of Thomas Harriot
In 2003 East Carolina University named its college of liberal arts the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences. This was in part because Thomas Harriot had been deeply involved in the first English colony in North America, sited on Roanoke Island in modern North Carolina; and because as “an adventurer, anthropologist, astronomer, author, cartographer, ethnographer, explorer, geographer, historian, linguist, mathematician, naturalist, navigator, oceanographer, philosopher, planner, scientist, surveyor, versifier and teacher,” there was hardly an area of not only the ancient but the modern liberal arts into which Harriot did not at least glance. It is not going too far to say that wherever Thomas Harriot was, there was a college of arts and sciences.
Robyn Arianhrod is both a mathematician and a writer, the author a series of wonderful books that explain maths even to those of us who are still a little frightened of them, doing so in lucid prose. She is therefore uniquely qualif…