Nicolaus Reimers

Nicolaus Reimers, also known as Reimarus Ursus and Nicolaus Reimers Baer, was a German astronomer and imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II. Born on 2 February 1551 in Hennstedt, he received hardly any education and herded pigs until the age of eighteen, until Heinrich Rantzau discovered his talent and employed him as a geometer from 1574 to 1584. At the court of William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, he met the instrument maker Jost Bürgi and translated Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium into German for him. In 1588 he published the Fundamentum Astronomicum and claimed to have devised a model of the solar system in which the planets circle the Sun while the Earth only rotates on its axis. He became a bitter rival of Tycho Brahe, who accused him of plagiarism, and he died in Prague on 16 October 1600.