The date chosen for the day is not accidental. One of Poland's - and the world's - greatest scholars was born on February 19, 1473. Nicholas Copernicus, a mathematician and astronomer, is known as the man who “stopped the sun and moved the Earth.”
In his work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, printed in 1543, he formulated a model that placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre of the universe.