Thomas Lydiat

Thomas Lydiat (1572 – 3 April, 1646) was a clergyman and mathematician in England. In his time he was noted as a chronologer and was an opponent in controversy of Scaliger. He is now considered, albeit in a very different type of theory, to have provided in 1605 a clear suggestion of an oval orbit in astronomy, anticipating Johannes Kepler, with whom he also had a controversial exchange relating to chronology.

His contemporaries ranked him with Joseph Mede and Francis Bacon. His ultimate poverty, certainly exaggerated, furnished Samuel Johnson with an allusion in his poem on the Vanity of Human Wishes.

The son of Christopher Lydiat, he was born in 1572 at Alkerton, Oxfordshire, of which living his father was patron. In 1584, at eleven years of age, he gained a scholarship at Winchester College, and passing thence to New College, Oxford, was elected probationer fellow in 1591, and full fellow two years later. He graduated B.A. 3 May 1595, and M.A. 5 February 1599.

Defective memory and speech led him to give up both the study of divinity and his fellowship in 1603, in order to devote himself to mathematics and chronology. In 1609 he dedicated his Emendatio Temporum to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who appointed him his chronographer and cosmographer, and took him into his household as reader, granting him an annual pension and the use of his library. During the course of this year he became acquainted with James Ussher.

He spent about two years in Dublin, became fellow of Trinity College, Dublin 7 March 1610, and graduated M.A. there in the summer of the same year. Ussher found him rooms in the college and an appointment as reader, with a salary. The mastership of The Royal School, Armagh, seems also to have been promised him. Before August 1611 he had returned to London, but he still wrote to Ussher pressing his claim to the mastership.

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