Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nicolaus Copernicus (the 19th of February 1473 to the 24th of May 1543) was a Renaissance polymath who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. His book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium triggered the Copernican Revolution and made a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on the 19th of February 1473 in the city of Toruń, in the province of Royal Prussia, in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, to German-speaking parents. He was the youngest of four children; his father was a merchant from Kraków who dealt in copper.
Nicolaus Copernicus obtained a doctorate in canon law and worked as a mathematician, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. From 1497 he was a canon of the Warmian Cathedral chapter, and he also administered estates and directed the defense of Olsztyn during the Polish-Teutonic War.
In 1517 Nicolaus Copernicus derived a quantity theory of money, a key concept in economics. In 1526 he wrote "Monetae cudendae ratio," formulating an early version of the principle that debased coinage drives good coinage out of circulation, later called Gresham's law, decades before Thomas Gresham.
Copernicus resisted publishing De revolutionibus, not wishing to risk the scorn he expected on account of the novelty and incomprehensibility of his theses. He finally agreed under strong pressure from his pupil Georg Joachim Rheticus, and the book appeared in 1543, the year of his death.
In 2004 a team led by Jerzy Gąssowski searched beneath Frombork Cathedral and in August 2005 found bones believed to be Copernicus's. DNA from the grave matched hair samples taken from a book he had owned, held at the University of Uppsala, and he was reburied in a second funeral on the 22nd of May 2010.