   monseigneur georges henri joseph Ãdouard lemaÃ®tre, (; 17 july 1894 &ndash; 20 june 1966) was a belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the french section of the catholic university of leuven. he was the first known academic to propose the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to edwin hubble. he was also the first to derive what is now known as hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before hubble's article.sidney van den bergh arxiv.org 6 jun 2011  [physics.hist-ph]david l. block arxiv.org 20 jun 2011 & 8 jul 2011  [physics.hist-ph]eugenie samuel reich [http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110627/full/news.2011
1894_births 1966_deaths 20th-century_Roman_Catholic_priests Alumni_of_St_Edmund\'s_College,_Cambridge Belgian_Roman_Catholic_priests Belgian_academics Belgian_astronomers Belgian_scientists Big_Bang Cosmologists Harvard_University_staff Members_of_the_Pontifical_Academy_of_Sciences People_from_Charleroi People_from_Leuven Recipients_of_the_Croix_de_Guerre_(Belgium) Relativists Roman_Catholic_cleric-scientists Walloon_movement_activists Walloon_people