Nicolaus Copernicus/Archive 2

Nicolaus Copernicus/Archive 2

Nicolaus Copernicus (German: Nikolaus Kopernikus; Polish: Mikołaj Kopernik; 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a heliocentric model which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the universe.

Copernicus lived in Royal Prussia, which had been ceded by the Teutonic Order to Poland in 1466, only seven years before Copernicus' birth. He studied at Kraków and subsequently at Bologna, Padua and Ferrara.

The publication of Copernicus' book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, is a watershed in the history of science. The book began the Copernican Revolution and was seminal to the ensuing Scientific Revolution.

One of the great polymaths of the Renaissance, Copernicus was also a jurist with a doctorate in law, a physician, quadrilingual polyglot (he knew German, Polish, Greek and Latin, and probably also Italian), classics scholar, translator, artist, governor, diplomat, and economist who in 1517 set down a quantity theory of money, a principal concept in economics to the present day, and formulated "Gresham's Law" in the year, 1519, of Thomas Gresham's birth.