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 a natural choice for German-speaking students, regardless of their ethnicity or self-identification. The surname "Kopernik", "Copernik", "Koppernigk" is recorded in Kraków from c. 1350, in various spellings, apparently given to people from the village of Koperniki (prior to 1845 rendered Kopernik, "Copernik, Copirnik" and "Koppirnik") in the Duchy of Nysa. Nicolas Copernicus' great-grandfather is recorded as having received citizenship in Kraków in 1386. The toponym "Kopernik" (modern "Koperniki") has been variously tied to the Polish word for "dill" ("koper") and German for copper ("Kupfer"). The suffix -nik (or plural -niki) denotes a Slavic and Polish agent noun, though. As was