Nicolaus Copernicus Prussia also resisted the Polish crown's efforts for greater control over the region. "Encyclopædia Britannica", "Encyclopedia Americana", "The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia", "The Oxford World Encyclopedia", and "World Book Encyclopedia" refer to Copernicus as a "Polish astronomer". Sheila Rabin, writing in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", describes Copernicus as a "child of a German family [who] was a subject of the Polish crown", while Manfred Weissenbacher writes that Copernicus's father was a Germanized Pole. There are additional arguments for Kopernik's Polish descent on his father's side. Kopernik's Y-DNA haplogroup, R1b L51, is found in southern Poland (in Silesia, where his father
Nicolaus Copernicus first to react to news of Copernicus's theory. Melanchthon wrote: Nevertheless, in 1551, eight years after Copernicus's death, astronomer Erasmus Reinhold published, under the sponsorship of Copernicus's former military adversary, the Protestant Duke Albert, the "Prussian Tables", a set of astronomical tables based on Copernicus's work. Astronomers and astrologers quickly adopted it in place of its predecessors. Some time before 1514 Copernicus made available to friends his "Commentariolus" ("Little Commentary"), a manuscript describing his ideas about the heliocentric hypothesis. It contained seven basic assumptions (detailed below). Thereafter he continued gathering data for a more detailed work. About 1532 Copernicus had