Maurice Loewy, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Maurice Loewy

French astronomer

Date of Birth: 15-Apr-1833

Place of Birth: Vienna, Austria

Date of Death: 15-Oct-1907

Profession: astronomer, astrophysicist

Nationality: France

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About Maurice Loewy

  • Maurice (Moritz) Loewy (15 April 1833 – 15 October 1907) was a French astronomer. Loewy was born in Vienna.
  • Loewy's Jewish parents moved to Vienna in 1841 to escape the antisemitism of their home town.
  • Loewy became an assistant at the Vienna Observatory, working on celestial mechanics.
  • However, the institutions of Austria-Hungary did not permit a Jew to advance to a senior position without renouncing his faith and embracing Catholicism.
  • The director of the observatory Karl L.
  • Littrow was a correspondent of Urbain Le Verrier, director of the Paris Observatory and he secured a position there for Loewy in 1860.
  • After going to France, Loewy become a naturalised French citizen. He worked on the orbits of asteroids and comets and on the measurement of longitude, improving the accuracy of the Connaissance des Temps.
  • He also worked on optics and the elimination of the aberration of light. He was elected a member of the Bureau des Longitudes in 1872 and of the Académie des Sciences in 1873. Loewy became director of the Paris Observatory in 1896, reorganising the institution and establishing a department of physical astronomy.
  • He further spent a decade working with Pierre Puiseux on an atlas of the Moon composed of 10,000 photographs, L’Atlas photographique de la Lune (1910), the definitive basis for lunar geography for over half a century.
  • The crater Loewy on the Moon is named after him and asteroid 253 Mathilde is believed to be named after his wife. He died in Paris at a government meeting of a sudden and unanticipated cardiac arrest.

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