What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 13 January 2023.

You know who Niklas Koppernigk was, but probably under the name of Nicolaus Copernicus or (if you’re Czech) Mikuláš Koperník. He was born in Toruń, now in Poland, in 1473. This is the (fairly 1970s, right?) pic of him in the Town Hall there.

He put forth the theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and that the planets orbit around it (first edition of his work on this, from 1543, below).

Bad news for those of us wondering if our CVs are sufficiently varied: he was also a priest, astrologer, jurist, governor, diplomat, economist and mathematician. Because sometimes creating modern astronomy just isn’t enough.

There’s no evidence of him ever having made it to Prague, although his ancestral village, Koperniki, is nowadays only 10 km north of the Czech-Polish border.

He died in Frauenberg (nowadays Frombork, also in Poland), in 1543.