Georges Lemaître

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist and mathematician, born in 1894, who made major contributions to cosmology and astrophysics. He was the first to argue that the recession of galaxies is evidence of an expanding universe and to connect the Hubble-Lemaître law with a solution of the Einstein field equations for a homogeneous and isotropic universe, which led him to propose the hypothesis of the primeval atom, now regarded as the first formulation of the Big Bang theory. He studied engineering, mathematics, physics and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain, was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1923 and was professor of physics at Louvain from 1927 until his retirement in 1964. He was also a pioneer in the use of computers in physics research.