Georges Lemaître was born on July 17, 1894, in Charleroi, Belgium. He completed his humanistic education at the Jesuit college in his hometown and entered the Catholic University of Louvain, where he studied engineering for three years.
From his early youth he had decided to enter the seminary to follow his vocation to the priesthood, which he lived as intensely throughout his life as he did his scientific vocation. World War I interrupted his engineering studies, and he volunteered for the infantry, and fought in the Battle of the Yser.
After the war he graduated, majoring in mathematics, and soon after attended philosophy courses at the Higher Institute of Philosophy in Louvain, founded by Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, which had a strict Thomist orientation. After completing his theological studies, he was ordained a priest in September 1923 by the same Cardinal Mercier.
While studying theology at the Maison Saint-Rombaut in Malines he did not abandon science and wrote his final paper, entitled La physique d’Einstein, which he used as a presentation to obtain a scholarship abroad. He spent the academic year 1923-24 in Cambridge, under the direction of the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who greatly influenced the development of the young priest’s thinking, so much so that Lemaître committed his whole life to answering the serious questions posed by his mentor. The following year saw Lemaître at the Harvard College Observatory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in Physics.
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