Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus (; Polish: Mikołaj Kopernik; German: Niclas Koppernigk, modern: Nikolaus Kopernikus; 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.The publication of Copernicus' model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Nicolaus Copernicus has received more than 6,804,106 page views. His biography is available in 158 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 153 in 2019). Nicolaus Copernicus is the 2nd most popular astronomer, the most popular biography from Poland and the most popular Polish Astronomer.

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer who is most famous for proposing the heliocentric theory of the solar system, which states that the sun is at the center of the solar system and the earth and other planets orbit around it.