Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Toruń, in Poland, the son of a merchant. After his father died, his uncle, a bishop, paid for his education at Kraków and in Italy, where he studied church law, medicine and astronomy. He became a canon of the cathedral at Frombork in northern Poland, where he managed church lands, practiced medicine, wrote on money and coinage, and helped defend the town in war. In his spare time he studied the sky. Astronomers had long followed Ptolemy, who placed the Earth motionless at the center of the universe. Copernicus worked out a system in which the Sun stands near the center and the Earth turns daily on its axis and travels around the Sun each year, which explained why planets sometimes seem to move backward. He hesitated for years to publish. His book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was printed in 1543, and tradition says he received a copy on the day he died. Its ideas were later developed by Kepler and Galileo.

Nicolaus Copernicus is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: A canon of the Catholic cathedral chapter of Warmia from 1497; whether he was ordained a priest is uncertain. Source: Wikipedia