Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 at Toruń in Poland; his father died when he was ten, and he was brought up by his uncle, a bishop. He studied astronomy, mathematics, medicine and canon law at Kraków, Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, and thereafter served all his life as a canon of Frombork Cathedral, while practising medicine, managing church estates and working on monetary reform. For decades he observed the heavens from a tower of the cathedral and gradually arrived at his theory that the sun stands at the centre and the earth moves around it, but he long hesitated to publish it. It is said that only on his deathbed in 1543 did he see the first printed copy of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.