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Georges Lemaître
Portrait Georges Lemaitre.jpg
Portrait of Lemaître
Born17 July 1894
Charleroi, Belgium
Died20 June 1966 (aged 71)
Leuven, Belgium
NationalityBelgian
Alma materCatholic University of Louvain
St Edmund's House, Cambridge
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forTheory of the expansion of the universe
Big Bang theory
Lemaître coordinates
AwardsFrancqui Prize (1934)
Eddington Medal (1953)
Scientific career
FieldsCosmology
Astrophysics
Mathematics
InstitutionsCatholic University of Leuven
Doctoral advisorCharles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin (Leuven)
Arthur Eddington (Cambridge)
Harlow Shapley (MIT)
Doctoral studentsLouis Philippe Bouckaert, Rene van der Borght
Signature
Georges Lemaitre signature.jpg

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, RAS Associate; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He proposed on theoretical grounds that the universe is expanding, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law, or the Hubble-Lemaître law, and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the "Big Bang theory" of the creation of the universe, originally calling it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom".

Early life