Paul Wittich

Who was Paul Wittich?

Paul Wittich was a German mathematician and astronomer 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.

Wittich was born in Breslau, Silesia, and studied at the universities of Leipzig, Wittenberg and Frankfurt/Oder. About 1580 Wittich stayed with Tycho Brahe on his island Hven in Öresund, where he worked at his Uraniborg. He then was employed by Landgraf Wilhelm IV. of Hessen-Kassel. He died in Vienna.

Wittich may have been influenced by Valentin Naboth's book Primarum de coelo et terra in adopting the Capellan system to explain the motion of the inferior planets.