Nicolaus Copernicus

Copernicus was born in 1473 in Royal Prussia, a polyglot borderland between Poland and the Teutonic Order. He trained as a polymath: mathematician, astronomer, physician, canon lawyer, economist, translator. From 1497 he served as a cathedral canon in Warmia. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money; in 1519 he formulated what would later be called Gresham's law. But the work that mattered came quietly, over decades: a heliocentric model he likely developed independently, though a Greek astronomer named Aristarchus had sketched something similar eighteen centuries before. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium appeared in 1543, just before Copernicus died in May of that year. The book triggered the Copernican Revolution and became a founding text of modern science.