Nicolaus Reimers

Nicolaus Reimers Baer, also called Reimarus Ursus, born on 2 February 1551 and dead on 16 October 1600, was a German astronomer and imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, known as Bär, Latinised to Ursus, the bear. Born in Hennstedt, he received hardly any education and herded pigs until the age of eighteen, but Heinrich Rantzau discovered his talents and employed him as geometer from 1574 to 1584, and he published a Latin grammar in 1580 and the Geodaesia Ranzoviana in 1583. At the court of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel in 1586 and 1587 he met the instrument maker Jost Bürgi and translated Copernicus's De Revolutionibus into German for him. He became a bitter rival of Tycho Brahe by claiming the Tychonic system as his own.