Nicolaus Copernicus

Born on 19 February 1473 in Toruń, in Royal Prussia, to a copper merchant and his wife, Nicolaus Copernicus lost his father around the age of ten and was raised by his maternal uncle Lucas Watzenrode, later Bishop of Warmia. He studied the liberal arts at Kraków, where he first met mathematical astronomy, then canon law at Bologna, where he lodged with the astronomer Domenico Maria Novara, and medicine at Padua, taking a doctorate in canon law at Ferrara in 1503. His uncle had already secured him a canonry at Frombork, and from about 1510 he lived there as a cathedral canon, working as administrator, physician, lawyer and, in the war of 1520 and 1521, organiser of the defence of Olsztyn castle against the Teutonic Knights. He wrote on currency reform and observed that bad money drives out good. All the while he kept watching the sky from a tower beside the cathedral, and about 1514 he circulated in manuscript a short sketch of a system with the sun at rest and the earth in motion. Mathematical astronomers heard of it, and he spent three decades reworking the full argument in Latin. In 1539 the young Wittenberg mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus arrived to study with him and published a first account of the theory in 1540. Rheticus then saw the manuscript toward the printer at Nuremberg, where it appeared in 1543 as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Copernicus suffered a stroke late in 1542 and died at Frombork on 24 May 1543, aged seventy.

In 1539 a twenty-five-year-old Lutheran mathematician, Georg Joachim Rheticus, travelled from Wittenberg to the Catholic canon at Frombork. He stayed two years, published a summary of the theory in 1540, and then carried the manuscript to Nuremberg for printing, while the long-reluctant Copernicus finally let it go.