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Yes and no. Early models of the motions of the stars and the sun assumed that the Earth was at the center with everything going around it because, after all, that's the way it looks to us.

But the math didn't work out, and nothing the early astronomers tried could make the math work out. Finally Nicolas Copernicus, a Polish monk, tried figuring out that perhaps the Sun was in the middle, with the planets going in circles around the Sun. This was an improvement because it explained the retrograde motion of the planets better than the geocentric model did.

But the math for this didn't work out perfectly, either. Finally Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, demonstrated that the math DID work if he assumed that the planets were traveling in ellipses.

Copernicus used only circles, a special case of ellipses. He did not work with the general ellipse.

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