Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 in Toruń. He died in 1534 in Frombork. Aside from astronomy, his professional interests included medicine, law, economy and administrative work.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in Toruń. At the age of eighteen he finished studying at the local parochial school at the Church of St John’s. He then moved to Kraków, where he studied between 1491 and 1495 at the oldest Polish university, which at the time was a centre of humanist thought and astronomical research.

In 1491, a year before Christopher Columbus discovered America, Nicolaus and his brother Andreas started studying at the University of Kraków after paying the required fee to the bursary. Copernicus’ original signature is still preserved at the Jagiellonian University Museum, where it is available for viewing together with a set of astronomical devices: torquetum (1480), astrolabe (1486), and celestial globe with astrolabe (1480) shipped from Hungary to Kraków during his studies.

Copernicus studied astronomy, which was then part of the quadrivium along with arithmetic, geometry and music, and, together with trivium formed the basis of all knowledge – philosophy. He was a student of a distinguished astronomer by the name of Wojciech of Brudzewo.

Copernicus’ most famous work is De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres), where he proposed a heliocentric model of the Solar System, which stood contrary to commonly held beliefs. The manuscript of the book as well as several later editions are kept at the Jagiellonian Library.