Copernicus, Nicolas(1473–1543)
Nicolas Copernicus, or Mikolaj Kopernick, was a Polish clergyman, physician, and astronomer, and the propounder of a heliocentric theory of the universe. He was born at Torun (Thorn) on the Vistula. He studied liberal arts, canon law, and medicine at the universities of Kraków (1491–1494), Bologna (1496–1500), and Padua (1501–1503) and received a doctorate in canon law from the University of Ferrara in 1503. Through the influence of his uncle, the bishop of Ermland, Copernicus was elected in absentia as a canon of the cathedral of Frauenburg in 1497. By 1506 he had returned to Poland, serving as physician to his uncle until 1512, when he took up his duties as canon. Copernicus's duties as canon involved him in the complex diplomatic maneuverings of the time and in the administration of the cathedral's large estates. In his own day he was more widely known as a physician than as an astronomer. He was one of the few persons in northeastern Europe to have a knowledge of the Greek language, and the one book he published without the urging of colleagues was a Latin translation of the poems of Theophylactus Simocatta, a seventh-century Byzantine poet. Copernicus's competence in economics was shown in some reports on money, presented to the Prussian diet, in which he anticipated a form of Gresham's law.
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