Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot graduated from Oxford around 1580, then sailed to Roanoke in 1585 on Walter Raleigh's dime, where he learned the Carolina Algonquian language from Wanchese and Manteo and worked with John White on navigation maps. Back in England he published The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia in 1588 - his only real book - covering settlements and money troubles in the colony. He's sometimes credited with bringing the potato to Britain. After that he settled into the service of the 9th Earl of Northumberland and spent decades filling private papers with mathematics and astronomy: he developed binary notation and arithmetic decades before Leibniz, and on 5 August 1609 became the first to draw the Moon through a telescope, four months ahead of Galileo. He also worked out a theory of refraction. He died on 2 July 1621, leaving most of his work unpublished; the binary system wouldn't surface until the 1920s.