莫里斯·勒维1833—1907

生平

洛维于1833年4月15日出生在玛丽亚温泉市(现捷克共和国)，1841年他的犹太父母为逃避反犹迫害从家乡迁至维也纳。后来洛维作为一名助理进入维也纳天文台，主要从事研究天体力学。由于奥匈帝国机构禁止提拨没放弃原信仰并改信天主教的犹太人，1860年，该天文台台长卡尔·路德维希·冯·利特罗夫将他推荐给巴黎天文台台长于尔班·勒威耶，到达法国后，洛维于1863年加入了法国籍。

洛维曾研究过小行星和彗星轨道并对地球经度进行过测量，他改善了《天文星历表》(Connaissance des Temps)的精度，还致力于光学和光行差校正的研究。

1872年他被选入法国经度局，并在1873年当选法国科学院院士。

1896年，洛维被任命为巴黎天文台台长，他对该机构进行了重组，并新组建了一个物理天文学部。1910年他发表出版了与皮埃尔·皮瑟用10年时间完成的一套由1万幅照片组成的《月球摄影地图集》(L’Atlas photographique de la Lune)，该著作成为半个多世纪来月球地理的权威理论。他还积极参与天图成像项目。月球上的洛威陨石坑以及小行星253 梅西尔德就是分别以他和他妻子的名字命名的。

1907年10月15日，他在巴黎政府会议期间，因突发心脏停博而去世。

荣誉

1889年被授予英国皇家天文学会金质奖章

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.

Honours

Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, (1889)