Life
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Toruń (Thorn), in the province of Royal Prussia, in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland.
His father was a merchant from Kraków and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Toruń merchant. Nicolaus was the youngest of four children. His brother Andreas (Andrew) became an Augustinian canon at Frombork (Frauenburg). His sister Barbara, named after her mother, became a Benedictine nun and, in her final years (she died after 1517), prioress of a convent in Chełmno (Kulm). His sister Katharina married the businessman and Toruń city councilor Barthel Gertner and left five children, whom Copernicus looked after to the end of his life.
Copernicus never married or had children.
"Towards the close of 1542, he was seized with apoplexy and paralysis." He died on 24 May 1543, on the day that he was presented with an advance copy of his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.
Read more about this topic: Nicolaus Copernicus
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
“This is one of the most serious intrusions into personal life that I can think of, and it’s as bad as anything I’ve ever experienced.”
—Ellen Wood Hall (b. 1945)
“It had been drilled into us that when an audience pays to see a performance, it is entitled to the best performance you can give. Nothing in your personal life must interfere, neither fatigue, illness, nor anxiety—not even joy.”
—Lillian Gish (1896–1993)