Exactly this.  Everyone says oh, it is so much easier to calculate with circles around the sun--this only true if you want wrong answers to the position of the planets. So wrong that you can see it with the naked eye.  Nobody believed Copernicus because his model was not predictive--this gets left out when we want to tell stories about Medieval anti-scientific bias.<p>When Kepler came along and introduces an elliptical heliocentric model with the equal areas law, scientifically minded people switch to the heliocentric view.  However, the math for this is really hard.  We use elliptical curves in cryto today.  You can calculate the position of a planet with Ptolemy&#x27;s model on an abacus with nothing more complex than division.