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reality. His prejudice still led him to believe that the universe had to be static.
    Friedmann gained notoriety for having corrected the great man himself. But even though he set some of his doctoral students to extend his ideas even further, and he himself continued publicizing Einstein’s work throughout what had by then become known as the Soviet Union, he returned to his work on meteorology. Friedmann died in 1925, at the age of thirty-seven, from typhoid fever caught while he was on holiday in Crimea, and his mathematical model of an evolving universe was to lie dormant for a number of years.
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    Georges Lemaître came to math and religion at a young age. He was good with equations, clever at coming up with clean, new solutions to the mathematical conundrums he was set in school. Having attended a Jesuit school in Brussels, Lemaître went on to study mining engineering and was still doing so when he was called up for the war in 1914. While Einstein and Eddington were campaigning for peace, Georges Lemaître was fighting in the trenches when the Germans invaded Belgium. The Germans destroyed the city of Louvain and outraged the international community, leading to the infamous manifesto of the ninety-three German scientists that so poisoned relations between English and German science. Lemaître was an exemplary soldier, becoming a gunner and rising in the ranks to become an artillery officer. Like Alexander Friedmann, he applied his knack for solving intricate problems to ballistics. When the war ended, he was cited for bravery in the Belgian army’s Orders.
    Lemaître’s experience of the carnage of battle, the devastating effect of chlorine gas in the trenches, and the brutality of the front affected him profoundly. Following active duty, he not only studied physics and mathematics but also entered the Maison Saint Rombaut in 1920 and by 1923 had been ordained a Jesuit priest. For the rest of his life, Lemaître would pursue his fascination for mathematics alongside his spiritual devotion, rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church to become the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He was a scientist priest who would turn his sights to solving the equations of the universe.
    While at university, Lemaître had already been enticed by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, giving seminars and writing short reviews on the topic at the University of Louvain. In 1923, he spent time in Cambridge, England, boarding at a house for Catholic clergymen and working with Eddington on relativity. Eddington pointed Lemaître to the foundations of relativity, giving him a front-row seat as the search for the true theory of the universe unfolded. Eddington was impressed by Lemaître, finding him“a very brilliant student, wonderfully quick and clear-sighted, and of great mathematical ability.” When Lemaître moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1924, the unsolved problem of how to accurately model the universe became his main concern, one he delved into deeply as he worked on his PhD at MIT.
    When Lemaître turned to cosmology in 1923, the two world models of Einstein and de Sitter were still at play. They were still the only two mathematical models to have come out of Einstein’s equations, yet they remained just that: two mathematical models without any observations privileging one above the other. Alexander Friedmann’s evolving universe had failed to make any impact, and Einstein’s prejudice against an evolving universe held enough weight to prevent anyone from pursuing it. According to the prevailing view, the universe was still very static. But Eddington had been intrigued by de Sitter’s model, in which stars and galaxies drifted away from the center of the universe. De Sitter had argued there might be a distinct observational signature of his universe. In such a universe, distant objects would look peculiar. Their light would be