ABSTRACT
Tycho Brahe is in no need of introduction. Described in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography with a few more lines than Niels Bohr, he may be the best-known Danish scientist ever. Tycho received international fame in his own lifetime, in part for his edition of his own correspondence, Epistolae astronomicae, printed at Uraniborg in 1598. He may even have been known to Shakespeare, in whose Hamlet the names of the figures Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are undoubtedly derived from two of Tycho’s ancestors, Sophie Gyldenstierne and Erik Rosenkrantz. Indeed, it has been argued that Hamlet is an allegory for the competition between Tycho’s cosmology and the infinite, Copernican world system of Thomas Digges (Usher, 1997; Usher, 1999). Whatever this speculation, already half a century after his death, Tycho Brahe became the subject of a major biography which further established his position as a pioneer and reformer of astronomy.
