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Nicolaus Copernicus D122-D126 (Life (Education in Poland (Upon his…
Nicolaus Copernicus D122-D126
Who is he?
Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 - 24 May 1543)
Was a Renaissance-era mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, likely independently of Aristarchus of Samos, who formulated such of 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 Coperican Revolution and making an important contribution to the Scientific Revolution
Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a religion that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466
A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was also a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist
in 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money - a key concept in economics -- and in 1519 he formulated an economics principle that later came to be called Gresham's law
Life
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Thorn (Modern Toruń), in the province of Royal Prussia, in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland
His father was an 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 named after her mother, became a Benedictine nun and , in her finals years, prioress of a convent in Chelmno (Kulm); she died after 1517
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 and is not known to have had children, but from at least 1531 until 1539 his relations with Anna Schilling, a live-in housekeeper, were seen as scandalous bu two bishops of Warmia who urged him over the years to break off relations with his "mistress"
Languages
Copernicus is postulated to have spoken Latin and German with equal fluency
he also spoke Polish, greek and Italian
The vast majority of Copernicusa's surviving woks are in Latin, which in his lifetime was the language of academia in Europe
Latin was also the official language of the Roman Catholic Church and of Poland's royal court, and thus all of Copernicus's correspondence with the Church and with Polish leaders was in Latin
Education in Poland
Upon his father's death, young Nicolaus' maternal uncle, Lucas Wastzenrobe the Younger (1447 - 1512), took the boy under his wing and saw to his education and career
Watzenrobe maintained contacts with leading intellectual figures in Poland and was a fried of the influential Italian-born humanist and Kraków courtier, Filippo Buonaccorsi
There are no surviving primary documents on the early years of Copernicus's childhood and education
Copernicus biographers assume that Watzenrobe first sent young Copernicus to St. John School, at Toruń, where he himself had been a master
Later, according to Armitage, the boy attended the Catherdral for entrance to the University of Kraków, Watzenrobe's alma mater in Poland's capital