Education
Born in Sneek, De Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory.
Astronomer mathematician physicist university professor
Born in Sneek, De Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory.
He worked at the Cape Observatory in South Africa (1897–1899). Then, in 1908, de Sitter was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Leiden University. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1919 until his death.
De Sitter made major contributions to the field of physical cosmology.
He co-authored a paper with Albert Einstein in 1932 in which they discussed the implications of cosmological data for the curvature of the universe. He also came up with the concept of the de Sitter space and de Sitter universe, a solution for Einstein"s general relativity in which there is no matter and a positive cosmological constant.
This results in an exponentially expanding, empty universe. De Sitter was also famous for his research on the planet Jupiter.
Willem de Sitter died after a brief illness in November 1934.
Family Another son Aernout de Sitter (1905 – 15 September 1944), was director of the Bosscha Observatory in Lembang, Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), where he studied the M4 globular cluster. Honours Academy of Sciences 253 (1934) 495/496 (one line) JRASC 29 (1935) 1 MNRAS 95 (1935) 343 Observer 58 (1935) 22 PASP 46 (1934) 368 (one paragraph) PASP 47 (1935) 65 Eleanor Kanegis Levin, artist and gallery owner, dies at 82 – The Boston Globe at www.boston.com (Eleanor Kanegis Levin).
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.