Thomas Harriot on Combinations
Thomas Harriot (1560?–1621) is known today as an innovative mathematician and a natural philosopher with wide intellectual horizons. This paper will look at his interest in combinations in three contexts: language (anagrams), natural philosophy (the question of atomism) and mathematics (number theory), in order to assess where to situate him in respect of three current historiographical debates: 1) whether there existed in the late Renaissance two opposed mentalities, the occult and the scientific;...