Thomas Digges

Thomas Digges was an English mathematician, born in 1546 at Wootton in Kent, who died in London on 24 August 1595. He was educated by his father Leonard Digges, and after his father's death John Dee gave him advanced mathematical instruction and remained a lifelong friend. His Pantometria, finished in 1571, treats the platonic and archimedean solids and contains a description of how lenses could be combined to form a telescope. In 1573 he published Alae seu scalae mathematicae on the new star of 1572, using his observations to argue that it lay beyond the sphere of the Moon. He became the leader of the English Copernicans, translated part of Copernicus's De revolutionibus, and added the idea of an infinite universe with stars at varying distances. His Stratioticos of 1579 is a mathematics book for soldiers, and he sat in parliament and served in the Netherlands from 1586 as master-general of the Earl of Leicester's army.