Thomas Digges

Thomas Digges (/dɪɡz/; c. 1546 – 24 August 1595) was an English mathematician and astronomer. He was the first to expound the Copernican system in English but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immoveable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying distances. He was also first to postulate the "dark night sky paradox".

Thomas Digges, born about 1546, was the son of Leonard Digges (c. 1515 – c. 1559), the mathematician and surveyor, and Bridget Wilford, the daughter of Thomas Wilford, esquire, of Hartridge in Cranbrook, Kent, by his first wife, Elizabeth Culpeper, the daughter of Walter Culpeper, esquire. Digges had two brothers, James and Daniel, and three sisters, Mary, who married a husband surnamed Barber; Anne, who married William Digges; and Sarah, who married firstly a husband surnamed Martin, and secondly John Weston.

After the death of his father, Digges grew up under the guardianship of John Dee, a typical Renaissance natural philosopher. In 1583, Lord Burghley appointed him, with John Chamber and Henry Savile, to sit on a commission to consider whether England should adopt the Gregorian calendar, as proposed by Dee.

Digges served as a member of parliament for Wallingford and also had a military career as a Muster-Master General to the English forces from 1586 to 1594 during the war with the Spanish Netherlands.