Biographical resources on Nicolaus Copernicus

Portrait of Copernicus
Image from Popular Science Monthly Volume 39This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

Today marks the 540th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543).   Copernicus (in Polish Mikolaj Kopernik) was a Polish Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a comprehensive heliocentric model which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the universe.

Interested readers can learn more about Copernicus by using a variety of biographical and research tools available from the Library.  (Some resources are limited to UChicago users).  Just a few of these are shown below:

Online biographical resources from Uni-Bonn’s history of astronomy site

Search for articles on Copernicus in ArticlesPlus, including this fascinating account found as full text in the JSTOR collection:

“Genetic Identification of Putative Remains of the Famous Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.” Wiesław Bogdanowicz, Marie Allen, Wojciech Branicki, Maria Lembring, Marta Gajewska, Tomasz Kupiec and Alan Walker. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol. 106, No. 30 (Jul. 28, 2009), pp. 12279-12282 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40484127

“Copernicus, Nicholas.” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 3. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008. 401-411. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.
http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX2830900984&v=2.1&u=chic_rbw&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w

For a YouTube video showing Google’s homage to Copernican observation and theory embodied as a Google “doodle”: http://youtu.be/mMdqVCZqKOk