Born on December 14, 1546. He later turned into an astronomer, astrologer and alchemist.
He was quite good at these endeavors, and was very well known in his time, and is still pretty famous today. He is famous for some star charts he didn't invent, a supernova he didn't discover, and some very exact numbers he misinterpreted to mean that the Sun revolved around the Earth. He had a nose that he claimed was made out of a silver/gold alloy (recently, analysis of his corpse suggest it may have been copper and zinc). He also had his own island with a very nice castle, for a while.
The Star Charts*: When Tycho was 17, he discovered that the Alfonsine tables were off by a month, and even the Copernicus tables were off by several days. One of his earliest accomplishments was correcting these errors. Of course, this involved many nights of stargazing; all of Tycho’s considerable fame and riches came from his talent of looking at stars.
The Supernova: in 1572 a new light appeared in the sky in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Tycho was not the first to see it, but he did notice it before it became public knowledge, and observed it using the most exact instruments of his day (no telescopes, yet). He found that it was indeed a new star, as it did not move in relation to the other stars. (This messed with the idea that God had made the stars on the 4th day and then left them alone). He published a book, De Nova Stella. Despite the name, he had no idea what the thing was. This book made him internationally famous. Because of his fame the king of Denmark gave him his own island, with money to construct an observatory, now known as Uraniborg.
The Numbers: Tycho spent 20 years looking at the night sky, and he kept very exact records. He had books full of data, in which his assistant Johannes Kepler was extremely interested. (But Tycho kept them to himself until his death, setting the field of astronomy back years). In the meantime, he worked on trying to figure out what the planets were doing. The Ptolemaic System put the Earth in the center of the solar system. This worked theologically, but not mathematically. Then Nicolaus Copernicus came up with the idea that the sun was actually the center of it all (The Copernican System). This worked (almost) mathematically, but it was not acceptable to the church. Tycho came up with the Tychonic System, in which the Earth was indeed the center of the solar system, and the sun revolved around it. The planets, in turn, orbited around the sun. This worked out (better, anyway) mathematically and was also acceptable theologically.
After Tycho's death Kepler used Tycho's observations to come up with Kepler's Laws, finally getting the math (but not the theology) to come out right.
Tycho's motto: "Not to be seen but to be" or maybe "Not to think, but to be". (My sources do not agree).
Tycho died in 1601
* I cannot find the source where I originally read this, and so the section on the star charts is partly from memory. Please let me know if you find an error.
Check out these sites
http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Catalog/Files/brahe.html
http://www.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/1995/lectures/tychob.html
http://www.nada.kth.se/~fred/tycho.html (has a lot of pictures)
A Yahoo.com search will get you a lot more.