Abstract
ASTRONOMY has suffered a heavy loss by the death of Willem de Sitter, director of Leyden Observatory. In the development of astronomical research in the present century, Holland has taken a conspicuous part; and, since the death of J. C. Kapteyn, de Sitter has been the leading astronomer of his nation. He is most widely known as the pro-pounder of the ‘de Sitter universe’, a recondite development of the theory of relativity which is the basis of our present idea of an expanding universe. But that reveals only one side of his versatility. The great research, which occupied him for thirty years, was in classical celestial mechanics; and in 1931 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded him its gold t medal “for his theoretical investigations on the orbits of the satellites of Jupiter, and for his contributions to the Theory of Relativity”. It is a strange chance that, of his most conspicuous contributions, one should relate to the Jovian systemfirst-fruits of the invention of the telescopeand the other to the remotest systems that the telescope has yet re vealed. But, setting aside his personal research, astronomers more usually think of him as the energetic head of a flourishing observatory, who by his sound practical judgment, his wide experience, and his single-minded character, has had a far-reaching influence on the general advance of astronomy.
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E., A. Prof. Willem De Sitter. Nature 134, 924–925 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134924a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134924a0
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