Georges Lemaître

Belgium Catholic priest, mathematician and astrophysicist who formulated the concept of the "big bang," which has become the leading theory of cosmology. His works include "Discussion sur l'évolution de l'univers" ("Discussion on the Evolution of the Universe"), 1933 and "L'Hypothèse de l'atome primitif" ("Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom"), 1946.

A civil engineer, he served as an Army artillery officer during World War I. After the war ended, Lemaître entered the seminary and was ordained as a priest in 1923. He developed an interest in astronomy while studying biblical creation, and from 1923 to 1924, he studied at the solar physics laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge from 1925-27. He became professor of astrophysics at the University of Louvain in 1927, and during that same year, he proposed his theory of the expansion of the universe.

Lemaître died on 20 June 1966 at age 71 in Leuven, Belgium.