Leuven, Belgium. Cosmologist Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître dies: a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, and mathematician who made important 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 of observation with the solution of Einstein’s field equations in the theory of general relativity for a homogeneous and isotropic universe. This work led Lemaître to propose what he called the “primordial atom hypothesis,” now considered the first formulation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. A few days before his death, Lemaître had been hospitalized in Leuven for a heart attack, where he was diagnosed with leukemia. His former colleague and friend Odon Godart visits him in the hospital with the news of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation: the definitive indication of the existence of the Big Bang. Lemaitre immediately grasps the significance of the discovery and is delighted. Two days later, he falls into a coma from which he never awakens.
