PHYSICIST

Georges Lemaître

1894 - 1966

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Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lə-MET-rə; French: [ʒɔʁʒ ləmɛːtʁ] ; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, and mathematician 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 observational Hubble–Lemaître law with the solution to the Einstein field equations in the general theory of relativity for a homogenous and isotropic universe. That work led Lemaître to propose what he called the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", now regarded as the first formulation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Lemaître studied engineering, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain and was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1923. Read more on Wikipedia

His biography is available in different languages on Wikipedia. Georges Lemaître is the 106th most popular physicist (down from 72nd in 2019), the 39th most popular biography from Belgium (down from 31st in 2019) and the most popular Belgian Physicist.

Georges Lemaître is most famous for his theory of the expanding universe. His theory was that the universe began as a small point of matter and has been expanding ever since.

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Among PHYSICISTS

Among physicists, Georges Lemaître ranks 106 out of 851. Before him are Eugene Wigner, Donald A. Glaser, Aage Bohr, Thomas Young, Peter Debye, and Mikhail Lomonosov. After him are Hannes Alfvén, Dennis Gabor, Clinton Davisson, Wilhelm Eduard Weber, Peter Higgs, and Ernest Lawrence.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1894, Georges Lemaître ranks 8. Before him are Nikita Khrushchev, Rudolf Hess, Gavrilo Princip, Aldous Huxley, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. After him are Boris III of Bulgaria, Jean Renoir, Maximilian Kolbe, John Ford, Marie-Adélaïde, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, and Joseph Roth. Among people deceased in 1966, Georges Lemaître ranks 7. Before him are Walt Disney, André Breton, Buster Keaton, Anna Akhmatova, Margaret Sanger, and Peter Debye. After him are Alberto Giacometti, Sepp Dietrich, Jean Arp, Sayyid Qutb, Giuseppe Farina, and Sergei Korolev.

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In Belgium

Among people born in Belgium, Georges Lemaître ranks 39 out of 1,190. Before him are Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy (1480), Baudouin of Belgium (1930), Albert I of Belgium (1875), Mary of Hungary (1505), Charles VII, Holy Roman Emperor (1697), and Eleanor of Austria (1498). After him are William III of the Netherlands (1817), Jacques Brel (1929), Hergé (1907), Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564), Henri La Fontaine (1854), and Princess Stéphanie of Belgium (1864).

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Among PHYSICISTS In Belgium

Among physicists born in Belgium, Georges Lemaître ranks 1. After him are François Englert (1932), Joseph Plateau (1801), Théophile de Donder (1872), Étienne-Gaspard Robert (1763), Léon Rosenfeld (1904), and Conny Aerts (1966).

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