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
Nicolaus Copernicus several Kraków astronomers with whom he collaborated in 1515–30 in observing eclipses. Tycho Brahe would include a fragment from the "Commentariolus" in his own treatise, "Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata", published in Prague in 1602, based on a manuscript that he had received from the Bohemian physician and astronomer Tadeáš Hájek, a friend of Rheticus. The "Commentariolus" would appear complete in print for the first time only in 1878. In 1510 or 1512 Copernicus moved to Frombork, a town to the northwest at the Vistula Lagoon on the Baltic Sea coast. There, in April 1512, he participated in the election of Fabian