Jeremiah Horrocks (nonfiction)

Jeremiah Horrocks making the first observation of the transit of Venus in 1639.

Jeremiah Horrocks (1618 – 3 January 1641), sometimes given as Jeremiah Horrox (the Latinised version that he used on the Emmanuel College register and in his Latin manuscripts), was an English astronomer.

He was the first person to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit; and he was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639, an event which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record.

His early death and the chaos of the English Civil War nearly resulted in the loss to science of his treatise on the transit, Venus in sole visa; but for this and his other work he is acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of British astronomy.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Mathematics (nonfiction)

External links:

• Jeremiah Horrock @ Wikipedia