from Wikipedia
In 1933, when he resumed his theory of the expanding universe and published a more detailed version in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels, Lemaître would achieve his greatest glory. The American newspapers called him a famous Belgian scientist and described him as the leader of the new cosmological physics.
On March 17, 1934, Lemaître received the Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction, from King Léopold III. His proposers were Albert Einstein, Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and Alexandre de Hemptinne. The members of the international jury were Eddington, Langevin and Théophile de Donder. Another distinction that the Belgian government reserves for exceptional scientists was allotted to him in 1950: the decennial prize for applied sciences for the period 1933-1942.
In 1936, he was elected member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He took an active role there, became the president in March 1960 and remaining so until his death. He was also named prelate in 1960.
In 1941, he was elected member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.
In 1946, he published his book on L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif (The Primeval Atom Hypothesis), a book which would be translated into Spanish in the same year and into English in 1950.
During the 1950s, he gradually gave up part of his teaching workload, ending it completely with his éméritat in 1964.
At the end of his life, he was devoted more and more to numerical calculation. He was in fact a remarkable algebraicist and arithmetical calculator. Since 1930, he used the most powerful calculating machines of the time like the Mercedes. In 1958, he introduced at the University a Burroughs E 101, the University's first electronic computer. Lemaître kept a strong interest in the development of computers and, even more, in the problems of language and programming. With age, this interest grew until it absorbed him almost completely.
He died on the 20th of June 1966 shorthly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, proof of his intuitions about the birth of the universe.
Sociable, devoted to his students and collaborators, he remained however an isolated researcher and one finds only few correspondences and scientific exchanges with his peers.
If this undeniable precursor of modern cosmology remains in the shade of the great names of the 20th century (Einstein, Eddington, Hubble and Gamow in particular), it is probably because he was a priest (Fred Hoyle, who coined the name Big Bang, never forgave him!) and because of the ambiguity of his character, at the same time modest and full of himself. Modest, because he neither pursued honors nor sought at all costs to be recognized. Full of himself, in his manner of affirming, at least in private, his capacities as a mathematician and the originality of his ideas. But that did not prevent him from being open, frank, merry, optimistic, jovial, and always remarkably flexible of mind.
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