Willem de Sitter
was born on May 6th, 1972, to town judge Lamoraal Ulbo de Sitter and
Catharine Theodore Wilhelmine Bertling de Sitter in the small town of Sneek,
located in northern Netherlands. Although coming from a typical and rather
strict family, Willem developed an imaginative yet intelligent mind that would
serve him greatly for his endeavors as an astronomer and a mathematician. His
intelligence and curiosity from the very beginning is what brought him to
develop an equal and unique passion for mathematics, cosmology, and astronomy.
A successful
mathematician, astrologist, and cosmologist, de Sitter begun his journey at the
University of Groningen, where he majored in mathematics. During his studies he
had a stroke of luck which consisted of him meeting David Gill, who was a
dedicated astronomer. Upon meeting him he consequently was invited to work at
“Her Majesty’s Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope”, from there his astronomic
endeavors took off. Besides his passion for astronomy, Sitter developed
theoretical models of the universe based off Einstein’s general theory of
relativity. Einstein claimed that the universe was static and unchanged;
however, de Sitter claimed that relativity implied the universe was constantly
expanded. Eventually after Edwin Hubble’s observations backed up Sitter’s
claims, Einstein also accepted this idea. Sitter’s contributions and
application of Einstein’s theory to astronomy was revolutionary and is noted as
a basis to many theories and progressions in astronomy as well as cosmology. De
Sitter was director of Leiden observatory until his death November 20, 1934 due
to a brief illness.
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