Birthday of Copernicus (1473) — Mathematical Elegance Over Authority

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Royal Prussia on February 19, 1473. His heliocentric model of the solar system — placing the Sun at the centre and Earth in orbit around it — was argued on mathematical grounds before physical ones. The Ptolemaic geocentric model required increasingly complicated epicycles (circles upon circles) to match observations. Copernicus showed that a Sun-centred model explained the same data with far fewer epicycles. His argument was essentially aesthetic: the simpler mathematics must be closer to the truth. He was right. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) was on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books for 200 years.