Nicolaus Copernicus pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution. Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was also a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money – a key concept in economics – and in 1519 he formulated an economic principle that later came to be called Gresham's law. Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Thorn (modern Toruń), in
European science in the Middle Ages effect on European society: the facilitated dissemination of the printed word democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas. When the Renaissance moved to Northern Europe that science would be revived, by figures as Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and Descartes (though Descartes is often described as an early Enlightenment thinker, rather than a late Renaissance one). Byzantine science played an important role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world and to Renaissance Italy, and also in the transmission of medieval Arabic knowledge to Renaissance Italy. Its rich historiographical tradition preserved ancient knowledge upon which splendid art,