Nicolas Copernicus

Nicolas Copernicus (February 19, 1473 ? May 24, 1543) was an astronomer who provided the first modern formulation of a heliocentric (sun-centered) theory of the solar system in his epochal book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). Copernicus was born in 1473 in the city of Torun (Thorn), in Royal Prussia, an autonomous province of the Kingdom of Poland. He was educated in Poland and Italy, and spent most of his working life in Frombork (Frauenburg), Warmia, where he died in 1543.

Copernicus was one of the great polymaths of the Renaissance. He was a mathematician, astronomer, jurist, physician, classical scholar, governor, administrator, diplomat, economist, and soldier. Amid his extensive responsibilities, he treated astronomy as an avocation. However, his formulation of how the sun rather than the earth is at the center of the universe is considered one of the most important scientific hypotheses in history. It came to mark the starting point of modern astronomy and, in turn, of modern science, encouraging young astronomers, scientists and scholars to take a more skeptical attitude toward established dogma.