Meet the Man Who Moved the Earth

Born in 1473 to a merchant family in Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus studied at some of his nation's best schools before shipping off to the University of Bologna in 1496. There, in Italy, he became a renaissance man.

Though he went to Bologna to study canon law, Copernicus lived with a mathematics professor who was the university's top astronomer--not to mention a critic of existing Ptolemaic astronomy. Evidently, Copernicus learned a lot from his housemate. By 1500, he was giving his own astronomy lectures in Rome. After that, he studied medicine at the University of Padua before taking his doctorate--in canon law--from yet another school, the University of Ferrara.

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