Paul Wittich

For the politician with the same name, see Paul Wittich (politician).
Tychonic geoheliocentric planetary model published 1587
Paul Wittich's 1578 Capellan geoheliocentric planetary model - as annotated in his copy of Copernicus's De revolutionibus in February 1578

Paul Wittich (c.1546 – 9 January 1586) was a German mathematician and astronomer[1] whose Capellan geoheliocentric model, in which the inner planets Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun but the outer planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbit the Earth, may have directly inspired Tycho Brahe's more radically heliocentric geoheliocentric model in which all the 5 known primary planets orbited the Sun, which in turn orbited the stationary Earth.[2]

  1. ^ Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-303476-6
  2. ^ See The Wittich Connection by Gingerich & Westman, 'Transactions of the American Philosophical Society' Vol 78, Part 7, 1988