This year the whole world celebrates the five-hundredth birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer and mathematician. In 1543, Copernicus published his book, Concerning the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres , which described a new theory about the relative physical movements of the earth, the planets, and the sun. It was in direct contradiction with the earth-centered theories which had been established by Ptolemy 1400 years earlier.