Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel over mathematics
At an engagement party in December 1566, a 20-year-old Tycho Brahe drunkenly argued with his third cousin about which of them was the better mathematician. Weeks later they settled it with swords in the dark. Tycho lost the bridge of his nose and wore a metal replacement for the rest of his life.
The prosthesis was long said to be silver and gold, but when researchers exhumed his body in 2010 and analysed traces, they reported in 2012 that it was brass. Tycho was born in 1546 at Knutstorp in Scania, then Danish, heir to several powerful noble families. A twin brother died before baptism, and at two he was taken to be raised by his childless uncle Jørgen. Sent to study law at Copenhagen at 12, he was captivated by the solar eclipse of 21 August 1560, largely because astronomers had predicted it, even if they were a day off.
A conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 1563 exposed errors in both the Copernican and Ptolemaic tables, convincing him that astronomy needed rigorous observation night after night with the best instruments possible. In 1572 he spotted a new star brighter than any planet. His measurements showed it lay beyond the Moon, overturning the Aristotelian notion of unchanging heavens, and he later showed comets were not weather in the atmosphere.
King Frederick II granted him the island of Hven and funds for Uraniborg, begun in 1576 and the first large observatory in Christian Europe. He lived there around 21 years, measuring the sky with the naked eye using quadrants, sextants and clocks, and his sister Sophie became his keenest assistant. Finding the instruments at Uraniborg insufficiently steady, he built the underground Stjerneborg. His own cosmology had the Sun circling Earth while the other planets orbited the Sun.
Christian IV forced him out of Denmark in 1597, and he became imperial astronomer in Prague. For roughly a year before Tycho's death in 1601, Johannes Kepler assisted him, then used the accumulated observations to work out his three laws of planetary motion. Tycho is often described as the greatest astronomer before the telescope.
Source: Tycho Brahe
