Nicolaus Copernicus

Copernicus was a canon of Frombork cathedral who administered estates, practised medicine, wrote on currency reform and defended a fortress during a war, and who did astronomy in the time left over, from a tower on the cathedral wall and with instruments he made himself. He worked out that placing the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre made the planets' apparent wandering simple instead of monstrous, and then spent about thirty years checking it, circulating a summary among friends and delaying publication.

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was printed in Nuremberg in 1543; the story is that a copy reached him on the day he died. An unsigned preface, added by a nervous editor, told readers the model was merely a calculating device — a hedge Copernicus had not written and probably would not have accepted. His burial place under the cathedral floor was unmarked and unknown for four and a half centuries. In 2005 archaeologists found a skull of the right age, and DNA from two hairs caught in a book he had owned, now in Sweden, matched it. He was reburied at Frombork in 2010 under a black stone showing a sun and six planets.