1473-1543
Astronomer

University of Cracow. Nicholas Copernicus was born in Torun in the far north of Poland in 1473. With the support of his uncle, a prominent member of the Catholic Church, Copernicus was able to attend the University of Cracow, Poland, from 1491 to 1496, where he became interested in astronomy. Cracow was among the leading north European universities, and Copernicus would have been exposed to the latest methods and controversies within astronomy and natural philosophy there. By the late fifteenth century, astronomy was suffering from a lack of precision—the mathematical models and techniques for predicting planetary alignments were out of date—as well as a fundamental disagreement about the proper foundations and purposes of the field. The mathematical astronomy developed in the second century C.E. by Ptolemy was technically sophisticated and worked reasonably well when used with high-quality, recent observations but violated some...