History of Astronomy – ‘The life and work of Professor Georges Lemaître’ by Rev Dr Jeremy Yates

Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), a Jesuit-educated Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, was the first to identify that the recession of nearby galaxies could be explained by a theory of an expanding universe. His theory was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. Ironically, it was Lemaître who was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble’s law, or the Hubble-Lemaître law, and who made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant – two years before Hubble’s own article. Lemaître also proposed the “hypothesis of the primeval atom” or what later became known as the “Big Bang theory”.

And yet, his contribution to modern science and cosmology was so much more even than that. Lemaître made use of computers throughout his career, making contributions to programming languages, introducing electronic computers to Belgium, quantum chemistry, cosmology, dynamical…