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novel solution was the brainchild of Eddington's former pupil, Abbé Georges Lemaître, both a physicist and Jesuit priest. A member of the faculty at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, Lemaître soon read the remarks Eddington made at the London meeting, published in the latest issue of the Observatory, and quickly sent off a letter reminding Eddington of a paper he had written three years earlier, which provided the answer Eddington craved. Few had seen the article, titled “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocities of Extra-Galactic Nebulae,” because for some unknown reason Lemaître had published it in an obscure Belgian journal, Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles (Annals of the Brussels Scientific Society) rather than a publication on every astronomer's must-read list. Eddington had either put Lemaître's paper aside, never getting around to reading it, or simply didn't comprehend its importance at the time. In any case, all memory of it had vanished from his mind. After receiving Lemaître's message, he was a bit shamefaced at the lapse. Looking back over the 1927 paper, he at last recognized its significance and with great enthusiasm made up for his blunder. He speedily sent de Sitter a copy of Lemaître's article, writing at the top, “This seems a complete answer to the problem we were discussing.” De Sitter as well grasped the brilliance of Lemaître's approach, calling it “ingenious” and immediately abandoning his own solution. Eddington soon arranged for Lemaître's paper to be translated and reprinted in the March 1931 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, where it could at last be given a proper showcase.

Originally trained in engineering, Lemaître had switched to mathematics for graduate work and upon receiving his doctorate enrolled in a seminary and was ordained a priest in 1923. Becoming fascinated with the mathematical beauty of general relativity, he went to Cambridge University for postdoctoral studies to broaden his understanding of Einstein's equations under the guidance of the eminent Eddington, who soon noticed Lemaître's talents. With his dark hair combed straight back and a cherubic face framed by round glasses, Lemaître could easily be spotted on campus because of his attire, either a black suit or an ankle-length cassock, set off by a stiff white clerical collar. Others could find him just by pursuing the sound of his full, loud laugh, which was readily aroused. Eddington told Shapley that the young Belgian, then turning thirty, was “exceptionally brilliant… quite remarkable both for his insight into physical significance of problems, and for his manipulation of intractable formulae.”

After a year in England, Lemaître traveled to the United States for further study and soon became aware of—and very interested in—the application of general relativity to cosmological questions. He made sure to attend the 1925 Washington meeting of the American Astronomical Society and was in the audience when Russell read Hubble's paper on the existence of other galaxies. While others in the room were focused on Hubble having ended the “Great Debate,” Lemaître was two jumps ahead. Though new to astronomy, he quickly realized that Hubble's discovery could also be applied to fashioning models of the universe. The newfound galaxies could be used as markers to test the condition of the universe as predicted by general relativity. Later that year, while at MIT to complete an additional PhD, he began modifying de Sitter's cosmological model. Before returning to Belgium, he visited Slipher at the Lowell Observatory, in Arizona, and also journeyed to sunny California, in order to meet Hubble and learn of the latest distance measurements of the spiral nebulae.

What Lemaître did not know during this interlude was that another researcher had already completed a similar modification. The Russian mathematician Aleksandr Friedmann had done this while Lemaître was still preparing for the priesthood. Trained in pure and applied