Copernicus, who moved the Sun to the centre, also worked out money theory
Nicolaus Copernicus is famous for putting the Sun, not Earth, at the centre of the universe. Less known is that the same church canon worked out an early quantity theory of money in 1517 and described the idea later named Gresham's law, that bad coins drive good ones out of circulation.
He was born on 19 February 1473 in Thorn, now Torun, a trading city on the Vistula in Royal Prussia, a region under the Polish crown. His German-speaking father dealt in copper, selling it mostly in Danzig, and died when Nicolaus was about ten. The boy's uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, a powerful churchman so hostile to the Teutonic Knights that their Grand Master called him the devil incarnate, took charge of his upbringing and, as Bishop of Warmia from 1489, of his career.
In 1491 Copernicus and his brother Andreas enrolled at the University of Krakow, then home to a strong school of astronomy and mathematics. He probably studied privately with Albert Brudzewski, read Euclid and the Alfonsine astronomical tables, and began collecting the library that Swedish troops later carried off in the 1650s; it survives at Uppsala. Krakow sharpened his sense that the two accepted systems, Aristotle's nested spheres and Ptolemy's circles upon circles, contradicted each other.
He left in 1495 without a degree. His uncle wanted him in a vacant canon's seat at Frombork, and when that was delayed, sent both nephews to Italy to study church law. Copernicus eventually earned a doctorate in canon law and from 1497 held his canonry, while also working as a physician, translator, diplomat and administrator. He never married, though two bishops pressed him to dismiss his live-in housekeeper, Anna Schilling.
His model of a Sun-centred universe appeared in On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published just before he died on 24 May 1543, and set off what became known as the Copernican Revolution. The ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos had proposed something similar eighteen centuries before, but Copernicus most likely reached his conclusion independently.
Source: Nicolaus Copernicus
