Poland Banknotes 1000 Zloty banknote 1982 Nicolaus Copernicus
National Bank of Poland - Narodowy Bank Polski
Reverse: Copernican heliocentric system.
Watermark: White Eagle - Coat of arms of Poland.
signatures:
President of the National Bank of Poland - Witold Bien
Chief Treasurer of the National Bank of Poland - Edmund Banasiak
Issue Date: July 2, 1975
Dimension: 138 x 63 mm
Printer: PWPW - Polska Wytwórnia Papierów Wartościowych S.A. (Polish Security Printing Works, Warsaw, Poland)
Banknote design by Andrzej Heidrich, engraved by Boguslaw Brandt.
In Circulation: from September 1, 1975 to December 31, 1996.
Poland banknotes - Poland paper money
1974-1993
100000 Zloty 200000 Zloty 500000 Zloty 1000000 Zloty 2000000 Zloty
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus (Polish: Mikołaj Kopernik; German: Nikolaus Kopernikus; 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at its center. The publication of this model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) just before his death in 1543 is considered a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making an important contribution to the Scientific Revolution.
Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been a part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. He was a polyglot and polymath, obtaining a doctorate in canon law and also practising as a 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, formulated a version of what later became known as Gresham's law.
Heliocentrism
Heliocentrism, or heliocentricism, is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the center of the Solar System. The word comes from the Greek (ἥλιος helios "sun" and κέντρον kentron "center"). Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center. The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos, but at least in the post-Ancient world Aristarchus's heliocentrism attracted little attention - possibly because of the loss of scientific works of the Hellenistic Era.
It was not until the 16th century that a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system was presented, by the Renaissance mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus, leading to the Copernican Revolution. In the following century, Johannes Kepler elaborated upon and expanded this model to include elliptical orbits, and Galileo Galilei presented supporting observations made using a telescope.
With the observations of William Herschel, Friedrich Bessel, and others, astronomers realized that the sun was not the center of the universe as heliocentrists at the time of Copernicus had supposed. Modern thinking is that there is no specific location that is the center of the universe, per Albert Einstein's principle of relativity.