William Petty lived the cliché: he was a genuine Renaissance man. By the time he reached his thirties he had been a music professor, an anatomist—a physician eager to dissect more or less any mammal that came his way—and a more than competent chemist. He was a constant inventor, turning his hand to everything from farm implements to ship design. Mathematics was an early love, and he had a gift for practical calculations. That would prove the skill that would make him rich, through his work as Ireland’s first comprehensive geographer.
