Biographies on Men of Science Ap Euro

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Toruń in Royal Prussia, part 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 (Culm, 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. He was a Polish priest and astronomer. He studied at the University of Kraków in Poland and later in Italy. In 1543, the year of his death, he published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, where he initiates the criticism of the then-dominant view of the position of the earth in the universe. Ptolemy crated the Ptolemaic systems which stated each planet is moved by a system of two or more spheres: one called its deferent, the others, its epicycles. Ptolemaic systems were discussed heavily around Copernicus’ time, in works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy. He discovered that the Sun is the center of the universe (Heliocentric Theory) and the planets and stars revolved around it. This discovery shattered the Geocentric Theory, the thought that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it.
Because he knew his findings would be rejected, and he might face execution, he did not publish his book On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies until 1543, the year he died.

Tycho Brahe is probably the most famous observational astronomer of the sixteenth-century, although is not always clear whether he is better remembered for the fact that his data provided the basis for the work of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), or because of the more colourful... [continues]

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