Georges Lemaître, Belgian priest, physicist, and astronomer (b. 1894)
Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lə-MET-rə; French: [ʒɔʁʒ ləmɛːtʁ] (listen); 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 second 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. Lemaître also proposed a version of the "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe, calling it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", and later calling it "the beginning of the world".