ALPHABETICAL BRAIN VOCABULARY 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL SCIENTISTS #10 NICOLAUS COPERNICUS Life Dates = 1473-1543 A.D. Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe. The publication of this model in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres just before his death in 1543 is considered a major event in the history of science. The book sparked the Copernican Revolution, which made an important contribution to the modern Scientific Revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries. Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been a part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. He was a polyglot and polymath who obtained a doctorate in canon law and also practiced as a physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. In 1517 he invented a quantity theory of money that is a key concept in modern economics, and in 1519 he formulated a version of what later became known as Gresham's Law. SOURCES = The Scientific 100 by John Simmons, Britannica Encyclopedia, and Wikipedia. INSTANTLY GO TO: CRITICAL THINKING EXERCISE: REMEMBERING THE TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL SCIENTISTS IN HUMAN HISTORY OR RETURN TO: ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY INDEX