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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, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to theorize that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by an expanding universe, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He first derived "Hubble's law", now called the Hubble–Lemaître law by the IAU, and published the first estimation of the Hubble constant in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Georges Lemaître has received more than 2,659,708 page views. His biography is available in 70 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 67 in 2019). Georges Lemaître is the 52nd most popular physicist (down from 50th in 2019), the 24th most popular biography from Belgium (down from 22nd 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.

Memorability Metrics

  • 2.7M

    Page Views (PV)

  • 71.80

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 70

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 9.48

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 3.56

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

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Among PHYSICISTS

Among physicists, Georges Lemaître ranks 52 out of 717Before him are James Chadwick, Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Ludwig Boltzmann, Hermann von Helmholtz, Christian Doppler, and Wilhelm Wien. After him are Philipp Lenard, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Max Born, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Otto von Guericke, and Gabriel Lippmann.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1894, Georges Lemaître ranks 7Before him are Nikita Khrushchev, Gavrilo Princip, Rudolf Hess, Edward VIII, Aldous Huxley, and Maximilian Kolbe. After him are Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Boris III of Bulgaria, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Norbert Wiener, and Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. Among people deceased in 1966, Georges Lemaître ranks 3Before him are Walt Disney and André Breton. After him are Alberto Giacometti, Anna Akhmatova, Buster Keaton, Ken Miles, Sergei Korolev, Peter Debye, Jean Arp, Sepp Dietrich, and Sayyid Qutb.

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Others Deceased in 1966

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In Belgium

Among people born in Belgium, Georges Lemaître ranks 24 out of 1,019Before him are Ursula von der Leyen (1958), Rogier van der Weyden (1390), Frans Hals (1582), Leopold III of Belgium (1901), Georges Simenon (1903), and Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy (1480). After him are Jacques Rogge (1942), Albert I of Belgium (1875), Jean-Claude Van Damme (1960), Charles VII, Holy Roman Emperor (1697), Jacques Brel (1929), and Mary of Hungary (1505).

Among PHYSICISTS In Belgium

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